Lecture on Life in Early Oak Ridge

ORICL Lecture Series
Lecture on Life in Early Oak Ridge
By John Rice Irwin
American Museum of Science & Energy
June 26, 2000
Announcer: Good morning and welcome to our class on ‘The Way We Were: Pre-Oak Ridge and Early Oak Ridge.’ This is the first of five sessions. The second one will be July, the 10th; we have to skip the 4th, and that’s followed July 17th, 24th, and 31st. And I recognize already some in the audience who are going to be on one of those panels. We’d like to thank the staff of the [American] Museum [of Science & Energy], because this changes their format in the morning when we use their auditorium. Also, the museum is going to be taping, videotaping for us, and I’m hoping that we can have one copy that we can have at the ORICL office so people could check it out, at least for a while. I would also like to thank our moderator, Joan Ellen Zucker, and I think a lot of you already know Joan Ellen (I’ve known her for years), because she is an early Oak Ridger from 1944, and I said, “Well, I’ll tell everybody you came here as a very young child.” And she’s been in local broadcasting since the 1950s. She is gonna introduce our speaker, and we’ll go from there.
Mrs. Zucker: I feel I should say, “Good morning class,” right? [laughter] No one could be better suited to open this course than our speaker, John Rice Irwin. He has been called Mr. Appalachia in many venues, and appropriately so. He’s perhaps done more than any man in our region to preserve and illuminate the culture of this beautiful part of the world. Born in Knox County, his family was forced in 1935 from their ancestral land in Union County by the rushing waters resulting from the building of Norris Dam. The Irwin family resettled to farmland in what we now call Gamble Valley, only to be ousted again by the Manhattan Project demands for the land which was to become Oak Ridge. Mr. Irwin was a soldier in Korea, earned a Bachelor’s Degree from Lincoln Memorial University with a major in Economics and History, and later earned a Master’s Degree in International Law from the University of Tennessee. From a career in teaching, he became a school principal and served three terms as superintendent of the Anderson County School System. He has been honored by colleges and universities for his devotion to the regional culture that is so dear to him. Most of you here today know him as the founder and director of the Museum of Appalachia in Norris, a museum many of us consider a totally unique and valuable living memoire dedicated to the people and history of our homeland, East Tennessee. But that’s his story and he will tell it, and it is my pleasure to introduce John Rice Irwin. Welcome.
[applause]
Mr. Irwin: Well thank you very much, thank you very much.
Mrs. Zucker: Because this course is called ‘The Way We Were,’ I’d like to go way back with you and start out by asking you to just start describing the physical images of the land that was here before Oak Ridge. What did it look like and what did it feel like?
Mr. Irwin: I’d spent all this time, Joan Ellen, making notes until the wee hours about what I was gonna say in this speech, and then she comes up and says she’s gonna ask me questions, see. [laughter]
Mrs. Zucker: I didn’t realize you’d made notes all night.
Mr. Irwin: If I don’t do well, it’ll be her fault. [laughter] I guess I will respond to that question, but I don’t come as an authority. Sometimes when people say nice things about you and so forth, you begin to believe them, you know, and when you’re asked questions about certain things, you begin to develop appropriate answers, whether you know about that which you’re talking or not. Is that good English?
Mrs. Zucker: Works for me.
[laughter]
Mr. Irwin: Okay. It reminded me of a – I was talking to Senator Howard Baker, who spoke down here last week, I guess it was, and ran into him two or three times, and last had lunch with him over at Regus. He wanted to go over there one more time before the Regus Institution in Knoxville closed. He was telling a story about – he was interested in the Civil War, and especially interested in aspects that had not been written in the history books, human interest type things, you know, and he kept hearing about this old man that claimed that he was in the Appomattox when General Lee surrendered to General Grant. And he finally got a chance to meet this old gentleman, and he said, “Well, tell me, I understand you were there when the Civil War ended.” He said, “Yeah, I was there. I was right there.” “Well, tell [me about it],” and Baker expected a long detailed description from this private who was standing over here as a guard or something, you know, and witnessed all this. So the old man said, “Well,” he said, “Lee walked out,” and said, “He took that sword off – grabbed that sword out and handed it to – or Lee walked up, took the sword out and handed it to Grant and said, ‘Here. Take the damn thing.’” [laughter] And that was the end of the story.
Mrs. Zucker: Is that what I’m doing to you?
Mr. Irwin: Well, later it turned out the old man had never even been there, you know, but he just imagined that Lee handed him the sword and, “Here. Take this damn thing. We’re through with it.” Well, how it was before it was is the question.
Mrs. Zucker: Well I just wanted to give the audience a feeling for the way the land was before we were all here. What was it like, you know.
Mr. Irwin: Well, I came here when I was five years old, and there was one little ribbon of a road that came through the area, and it was Highway 61, and roughly follows, more than roughly, I guess, the course of the present Turnpike. It was just a very narrow two-lane road and was the only, I’m pretty sure, the only paved road anywhere around. And when you came in at Elza Gate, there was just a – from there to here – there was one house (I noticed it a while ago) that’s still standing. When you come from the Clinton area into what is now Oak Ridge, there’s a little stone house on the left, and it had been built just before Oak Ridge. And interestingly, I remember hearing the owners say that what the government offered for that house and the land was less than what they had spent building the house, which was not uncommon. So I remember from that point there was a few farms, and down where the Oak Ridge, the AEC building, you call it, the big building on the left coming down? Is that what you call it?
Mrs. Zucker: Well, the Castle?
Audience Member: Federal Building.
Mr. Irwin: The Federal Building, Federal Building. Well, where it stands, there was a –some of the people – maybe I should go back just a little bit – my people settled in 1784 up this same valley. People don’t refer to valleys and ridges by the same names in different communities. Clinch River starts up around Blue Field, West Virginia – just below that, I guess – and it’s known as Clinch River all the way down. Powell River’s the same. The Mississippi River starts up in Minnesota, I guess, and it’s called the same. Valleys are not. Up in that area, we called it ‘Big Valley’; everybody did. And then when you get further down into this area, it was called something else. Same thing with the ridge: we called it ‘Big Ridge.’ And then when you get down into here, it was called ‘Pine Ridge.’ At any rate, my people settled in the same valley in that timeframe, and they lived there until 1935 when the dam was built. Seven hundred and thirty-five miles around the lake, the largest concrete dam in the world when it was built, they say. So it’s difficult to imagine what a traumatic thing it was for the people to have to leave their homes and their graveyards, and all the things that had belonged to their fathers, their great-grandfathers, and great-great-grandfathers. And the other thing was, of course, that they would – it was sorta like their whole world was coming to an end. So, many of them came to this area. My grandfather came here and lived in the old McKamey place. It was a beautiful place, I thought, sort of a pre-antebellum place, with the magnolia trees and the concrete walks, old, and the upping block out front and things of that sort. But our house was next to it, which we built, and it was just a small two or three-bedroom house. But the reason I go into all this is that those people from up in Union County, from Big Valley, from that flooded area, tended to come down here as sort of a colony. My grandfather and grandmother, and my uncle Marl and Roger – Roger owned a farm where the Oak Ridge Hospital is now located. And at that time, he owned all that land back in there. It wasn’t worth anything much, but I went down to see my aunt a few months ago in the Oak Ridge Hospital. She was in there; lacked a year being a hundred years old. And I never called – for some reason, we called our aunts – some of them, our aunts and uncles, we put that title – but we just called her ‘Marie,’ and she was lying there in that hospital, large hospital in the middle of a big town, and I said, “Marie, do you know where you are?” And she said, “I reckon I do. I’m back to my old homeplace.” In addition to those people, I had several cousins. Handy Stooksbury lived, as I was saying, starting to say, where the Federal Building is now located. It was sort of a poor rocky farm, and he had several children. Some of them are still living over in this area. Some of them are living in Oak Ridge, I think. And he, like everyone else, had a difficult time during the depression. I remember one time – he never had an automobile – but he raised a little tobacco, and they say that it takes thirteen months to raise tobacco. You start sowing your bed in January; you’re burning your bed to get rid of all the seeds and weeds and so forth. I hope you don’t have too many questions.
Mrs. Zucker: No, you’re answering them all. Got ’em all on a piece of paper and you’re just answering them.
Mr. Irwin: You know, this goes to, I think, what you’re asking. He raised this tobacco crop and then the kids were getting ready, perhaps gone back to school, and he had five or six girls and two boys, and they were all looking forward to getting new shoes and clothes, or getting any shoes at all, I guess, from the tobacco crop, and anything they wanted, you know, for Christmas and whatever, it was all hinging on the money that they got from selling the tobacco over in Knoxville. Well, it wasn’t a real good year, and it didn’t do too well, but they tended it and worked all summer on it, and the kids helped, the children helped to hand it off, grading it. At that time you had to separate it into seven grades: trash, light red, dark red, lugs, cutters, and tips. I can remember that, but I can’t remember where I parked out front. [laughter]
Mrs. Zucker: Well, we don’t want you to leave so you can’t go back to the parking lot.
Mr. Irwin: Yeah. So he had to hire – and, of course, he tried to take it to Knoxville, and they charged to sell it. And when he paid people for loading it and the truck driver taking it over there and then the fee for selling it, he didn’t get enough money for it to pay for selling it. So he came back home and all the kids were, you know, running at the door, and he had to tell them, you know, that he didn’t end up with any money at all. And he was a hardworking fellow. We used to play there on his place. They were cousins of ours, and there was an old mulberry tree there, and it’s still there, I think, and it was big and hollow at the time, about, it seems like that big [holds arms out wide] and we would hide in that tree when we were playing hide-and-seek, you know. And it was a mulberry tree, and I think the reason, perhaps, that that mulberry tree was there, and we had – my grandfather had a couple of big mulberry trees – that at one time it was thought that the silk industry was going to be an important industry in Tennessee, and people started raising silk[worms]. One of my ancestors, ‘Raccoon’ John Miller, introduced silkworms into Knoxville for – had planted mulberry trees, and according to the Knoxville Gazette in – I think it was 1795, 1795 there were a few people there – he was talking about the article, mentioned that Captain Miller had raised so many pounds of silk and it took almost – and he did it without any labor, because it was processed by women and children, so no labor involved. [laughter]
Mrs. Zucker: Can I ask you where you sold things? I mean, what were the centers of commerce?
Mr. Irwin: Well, Knoxville, when we talked about going to town, we talked about going to Knoxville, and sometimes, well, often to Clinton.
Mrs. Zucker: So that’s where your tobacco was purchased? In Knoxville mostly?
Mr. Irwin: But true sold it, yeah, in Knoxville, but in the big warehouses in Knoxville.
Mrs. Zucker: How’d you get it there?
Mr. Irwin: Well, there were trucks. There was two trucks, two people that owned trucks in the area. One was Wylie Cassidy, who lived up on what’s called ‘Peach Orchard’ later on. They still call it that?
Mrs. Zucker: Yep, they do.
Mr. Irwin: And Wylie had a big peach orchard there and people would tend to go in there of a night and with the grass sacks, burlap bags, you would call them, and fill them up with those peaches and go out and ostensibly make it into peach brandy. The other truck driver – I could get off on that whole thing there – but the other guy was a man by the name of Edmondson. So, during the war when we had to move, everything was rationed, tires and so forth, so that made it very difficult to move out. But there was about, in that colony that my grandfather – I guess he was sort of the titular leader, and he – there was about twelve or fifteen families. I think the land we’re sitting on now belonged to Connard Stooksbury. But he built a church which stood until just a few years ago there off, just right off the Turnpike.
Mrs. Zucker: What was your family’s socioeconomic position? Were you better off than some people? Were you less well-off? What was your status?
Mr. Irwin: Well, I asked this old man – I won’t get into that. You could answer that two different ways. Here’s a photograph of my – you can’t see it very well, but my grandfather and grandmother and their five children that was taken here in the yard and they’re dressed up in their Sunday best and they look like very affluent people, and their house looked very affluent.
Mrs. Zucker: And handsome.
Mr. Irwin: And then this is the little house that we lived in. But everything is relative, you know. If you passed the home, it would have, I think, been impressive, the boxwoods, and, as I said a while ago, the magnolias and the big upping block out front. But we had three hundred and twenty-five acres of land, and two or three rental, we called them, not tenant houses, but renter houses. But the people lived there, I don’t think they ever paid any rent, but they worked some on the farm. But on the other hand, we lived in an economic condition that was comparable to the Middle Ages or even before. There were people living in Italy that were living better before Christ than we were living here. I just got back from Italy, and Pompeii, for example, you’ve been there, I’m sure, some of you, and they had running water, which we didn’t have. They had a sewer system, which we didn’t have. So we raised everything we ate, practically. We raised wheat and we had it ground and took it down to Lenoir City to a big mill, crossed the river on a ferry, and that flour would last us an entire year. You can’t do corn that way, because the meal will become musty and molded, so we took it out to McWayne’s corn mill. And we raised all of our vegetables and canned them and dried them, and my grandmother had a big cannow, she called it and all summer she was canning beans, especially and beats and kraut and every vegetable that you could think of. So we had no, in our house, we had no running water, we had no telephone, we had no electricity, and when you say you have no electricity, that says a lot. We had to carry the water, our drinking water, from a quarter of a mile away. So even though we were better off than a lot of people, we still were living frugally, and we would have no matter how much my parents and my grandparents – they never changed their way of living even though later on they could have.
Mrs. Zucker: What was the center of your family culture? Was it the church, was it music, was it family life in the evening? How would you describe that?
Mr. Irwin: Well, of course the church was the – there was Baptist churches, and I think we may have had the only Methodist church that my grandfather built, and that was – in addition to the religious center, it was also the social center, as you can imagine. My grandmother went to church, I think, almost every Sunday, but sometimes when she was having a lot of people to eat, sometimes as many as thirty-five on Sunday, and she had to start catching – my brother and I had to start catching the chickens the day before, and she would ring their necks, and she was picking the beans on Saturday and baking all the cakes and pies for the thirty-five people that were going to be there on Sunday, so on this particular occasion, I remember that she didn’t do because all these people were coming. This gives you a little idea of – she said she was wondering if the people at church missed her, you know, and she said, “Well, who was there? Was so-and-so there? Was Ike there? Was Bert there and Handy there?” and so forth, and she kept talking, expecting them to say, “Well, they were asking about you,” and they never did, you know. And finally she said, “Anybody ask about me?” And so that’s what she was getting at all along. So it was a social thing, and the one thing that has been alluded to, I think, before is the fact that there was no kind of recreation, of course.
Mrs. Zucker: So how did you play?
Mr. Irwin: Well, who said you were supposed to play? [laughter]
Mrs. Zucker: Okay, fair enough.
Mr. Irwin: As kids, you know, we had these games, ‘fox and dog,’ and we’d run up in the loft and jump off and this kind of thing, but the great social event was getting together and talking. On Sunday afternoon, the people in Knoxville, our cousins, would come out and sit out in the front yard of Grandpa’s and Granny’s house and tell stories. Told the same story over and over again, but they were always funny. Everybody knew the stories that were going to be told, but that’s – when they told them – Uncle Lee Irwin was a great fiddler and a lot of other people in Knoxville came out. And then on of a night, a lot of times the men would gather on the front porch and the women would be in the kitchen somewhere, and they would do nothing but talk. And when we thought – we knew that one of these things were coming about, it would never have occurred to us, what are we going to do? Are we gonna have coffee and cakes or this and that? We just got together and talked and one person would talk and another one would pick it up and so forth, and I would sit and listen to this, especially when my grandfather talked about the stories. He was born in 1861, so he could remember people who were here when the country was formed, you know. So it’s a very young nation, and to have him to talk about his great uncles and all and the Revolutionary War, why it sort of gave you a perspective of the country’s history, I guess.
Mrs. Zucker: Where did your family immigrate from? Do you have any idea? Irwin sounds English.
Mr. Irwin: Well, it’s an amalgamation, I guess, a mixture. The Irwin family came from Scotland. There’s a town there named Irwin in Scotland, spelled the same way. They went to, later, went to Ireland and, of course, the people in Northern Ireland are called Scots Irish and most of those people are Scotch. ‘Scots,’ not ‘Scotch,’ they tell me. Scotch also, but also Scots. And I was descended from the Longmeyers, which is English. The Stooksburys, which are also English, there’s a little town down below London called Stokesbury, and the Sharps, interestingly, there were hundreds of thousands of Sharps that were descended from those five brothers that settled up there, and the Sharp name is German, although you would think it would be English, and if it’s spelled Sharp, it is English, I guess, but originally it was spelled Scharf, S-C-H-A-R-F, or something close to that. So they were all German. The Graves, G-R-A-V-E-S, sounds English, but it also was German, because it was spelled G-R-A-F-F-S or something, Graffs. Miller, sounds very English; it also was German. It was Mueller. So all of our – and the Rices were Welsh.
Mrs. Zucker: Is that typical of the mixture that settled this region?
Mr. Irwin: Well, I think so. Most people say that it was settled by the Scotch Irish and the nobel independent suffrelite people and so forth, but I think most of the early rosters would indicate that there was more English names than there were anything else, and a lot of the German has certainly been underestimated.
Mrs. Zucker: Listening to the names that you have just listed, they’re all names that are – many of them are still names that exist in the county, Stooksbury and Longmeyer, these are all names that are familiar to me having lived in Norris for some years, so they’re still the people of Anderson County that you are describing.
Mr. Irwin: They say that there’s so many Stooksburys, they say that the Stookburys and the crabgrass are taking everything over.
[laughter]
Mrs. Zucker: Do you have any memory about the first move when TVA ousted you? You were a little boy, I know.
Mr. Irwin: Are you talking about here?
Mrs. Zucker: Yeah, here. Your first move was ‘encouraged’ by TVA, but the building of Norris Dam. Do you have any memory of that? You must have been five years old or something.
Mr. Irwin: Are you talking about when I came here from Union County?
Mrs. Zucker: Yeah, that first time.
Mr. Irwin: Well, I have just vague recollections. I remember the trauma and wondering why the people were so upset and all. They told the story of my great aunt – Rufus Rice, who built the old grist mill that you’re familiar with in Norris, and his wife. And when we started to buy the land where Norris Lake is now located, she was very much opposed to it, very saddened, and a fellow by the name of Marshall was in charge of purchasing the land. And after a while, he would visit back and forth, and he gained the friendship of Uncle Rufy Rice, who was born in 1858 and was out in the west with Teddy Roosevelt, and he had a fabulous career. But Aunt Nan was her name, and she said, “Well, my greatest dreams and my only hope is that I can live here the rest of my life,” said, “I have three babies buried up there under the cedar trees, and all of my ancestors are buried here, and this is all that we’ve ever known.” And then she said, “But if you think that it – you say it’s gonna help a lot of people, and it’s gonna be good for the country,” and she said, “I’m ready to go.” And Uncle Rufy – they wanted to buy the old mill that was built in the 1700s by his ancestor and my ancestor. It was still in operation for many years. For decades, it was pictured in the World Book Encyclopedia as the type of thing representing the beginning of the industrial revolution, the wooden cogs and the gears and the power from the water wheel. So he said, “I’m not sellin’ it to TVA. I don’t like TVA.” And Mr. Marshall said, “Well, Rufy, you’re gonna have to move and you’re gonna have to do something with the mill. What are you gonna do with it?” He said, “Well, I’m not gonna let TVA have it.” And he said, “Well, you know, again, what are you gonna do with it?” And he said, “I’m gonna give it to you.” And Marshall said, “Now, you understand, if you give it to me, you know, what I’m gonna have to do with it. I’m gonna have to give it to TVA.” He said, “I don’t want to hear that. I’m not givin’ it to TVA; I’m giving it to you, and I don’t want to know what you did with it.” So he could live with himself by saying that. So those were the kind of things I remember when we first moved from up there down here.
Mrs. Zucker: Now, electricity did make an enormous difference. Did it make a huge difference in your life?
Mr. Irwin: Well, we never had it down here.
Mrs. Zucker: You never got it after TVA produced it?
Mr. Irwin: You know, I have been in years past a great proponent of TVA and a great defender. I think it was one of the best run organizations in America, federal organizations, and it’s gone from that to the total opposite now, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t get into that political aspect.
Mrs. Zucker: That’s another lecture.
Mr. Irwin: Another lecture, which people don’t want to hear. But at any rate, we moved within three quarters of a mile from where the electric lines ran, and for seven years we tried to get electricity. I’m not saying this in order to prove any point. I’m saying it because it was true. We made all kinds of – and my people did all kinds of inquiries and so forth about getting electricity to run that half a mile for several homes over there. And then they said, well, we’d have to agree to take so many things, a refrigerator and so many lights and all that kind of thing. And my people agreed with all that, but when we left here, we still had not had electricity in our homes.
Mrs. Zucker: I want to make a big leap now over a lot of years and ask you about the second eviction in your life, which leads us into Oak Ridge history. What’s the first thing you remember about the coming of the great event. What were the first rustlings in the county?
Mr. Irwin: Well, I heard, and we all heard, that they were building some sort of a little spur line off the railroad up at Elza Gate. They still call it Elza Gate?
Mrs. Zucker: Yes, they do. We don’t use it anymore much. I mean, the Elza underpass is –
Mr. Irwin: But you all know where it is.
Mrs. Zucker: Yeah.
Mr. Irwin: They were building this little line, sidetrack, off of the railroad there, and started unloading equipment and people were talking about what they were doing, and nobody knew, and that was the first thing. The second thing, over in front of our house, and we lived on, well, you know where Liz’s Market used to be?
Mrs. Zucker: [to the audience] Everybody know where that is?
Mr. Irwin: We lived close to that. It was totally different country at the time. And over in front of our house, people started to come in. Surveyors came in. As a matter of fact, I have in the museum one of the first supposedly transit and so forth that was used here. And they started surveying everywhere, everywhere you’d go, there’d be surveyors out. Of course, all the oldtimers here were going out and asking them what they were doing, thinking that they knew. Of course they didn’t know any more than we did. One of their stock answers was that they were gonna build a big ball diamond down here, a World Series and all this kinda thing.
Mrs. Zucker: Every kid in the county was excited when they heard that, I bet.
Mr. Irwin: Yeah. And then the third thing that I remember in the very early stages, that they were building something over in front of our house. Looked like a fortification of some sort. And I think it was a place to store munitions and blasting powder and things of that sort. But those were some of the very first – everybody was speculating. A lot of the older people were saying that when the Indians left here, that they had told the white people, the settlers, that there was enough gold and silver buried in this area to shoe their horses, and the older people were saying that the federal government, Uncle Sam, had found out where this was buried and was gonna get all of us outta here so they could come in and get that gold and silver.
Mrs. Zucker: Unfortunately that wasn’t true, right?
Mr. Irwin: Well, I don’t know, maybe they did. There was supposedly some gold and silver buried on our farm by an old fellow supposedly by the name of Collins Roberts, after which Robertsville took its name. People would come there in the ’30s and dig and slip in there of a night and dig for that gold.
Mrs. Zucker: Well, do you remember the moment when your family learned that you were going to be moved and the reactions to that?
Mr. Irwin: When we came home from Nash Copeland’s store, most of you, you knew Nash Copeland, didn’t you? He was a merchant here. Then he was a prominent citizen and sort of the spokesmen for the people who lived here, and he died, what, a couple of years ago, I guess. He has a son living here. I think Bobby, and some others maybe. But we’d been to the store that day and we came home and saw this little piece of paper that was tied to the – attached someway to the screen door of the front porch. And it was a notice. I remember that my father and mother, what a strange and disturbing look they had on their faces when they read it. And the essence of it was that we had, I think it was two weeks to get out. I have a copy, not of that one, but of another eviction notice that said, “The government is planning to take this property. You have fourteen days to vacate the premises.” And it was that terse and unapologetic, you know, kind of thing.
Mrs. Zucker: That must have been such a terrible shock to your family and to all the other families in the region.
Mr. Irwin: Yeah, they had a meeting. I think this was interesting. At the time, the congressman from this area was John Jennings, and at that time, the office of Congress was viewed with a great deal more respect and we thought that there’s nothing that a congressman couldn’t do. I mean you get to the congressman, that’s almost the deity Himself. And we had a meeting down at Robertsville Church House, and I was there, and what I remember most is these people getting up and I guess sort of testifying. I remember one lady got up and said that her grandfather, I guess it was her grandfather, or great-grandfather, I think it was her grandfather, came here in an oxcart from North Carolina, and they’d cleared the land and worked it and improved it and picked the rocks off of it and spent generations improving it, and they just didn’t want to leave. They didn’t know where they would go. I mean, most of the people in this area was not widely traveled, and just to say, you know, “You gotta move” – and I remember other people getting up and begging Congressman Jennings to do something, and he didn’t – I’m not sure that he himself knew what the purpose of it was – but he, of course, didn’t take away their hopes, and left the impression that he might do something about it.
Mrs. Zucker: Do you know how much you got paid? What was the going rate for farmland, the Oak Ridge Reservation, as we used to call it?
Mr. Irwin: Well, there was an old lady, a black lady that lived up on the ridge from us, and Nash Copeland knew the details better than I did, but she had a little cabin, and she had enough ground to raise potatoes, enough potatoes to do her all year, and onions and a little corn, and raised – had a cow for her milk and butter, and was, you know, got along quite well and was happy. And they appraised her land based on the going per acre rate, which was very, very little. And Nash said that when she had to try to hire a truck to take the cow somewhere else and the chattels and the few pieces of furniture and the plows and things like that, that she didn’t get enough out of the land – I think it was between two and three hundred dollars that they paid for her house and her land, and by the time she got through having her things hauled out, she didn’t have but maybe a hundred dollars or less.
Mrs. Zucker: Where did these people go? Where did your family go? How did everybody find places to relocate?
Mr. Irwin: We went straight up the valley. Let me ask you – you asked about – before I forget – you remember that question.
Mrs. Zucker: All right.
Mr. Irwin: You asked about how much we got. How much the land was – that was one extreme. We had, as I said, three hundred and twenty-five acres, which is quite a little bit of property. It went from the top of the mountain over here. [points to his right] Am I pointing the right way? Sorta that way? Which way?
Mrs. Zucker: Probably that way. [to the audience] Anybody know? Which ridge?
Mr. Irwin: Pine Ridge, Y-12’s across it.
Mrs. Zucker: Oh, then you were pointing the right direction.
Mr. Irwin: Then from there, all the way over to, well, nearly a mile in the other direction. But at any rate, we had this, my grandfather’s house, which was really a beautiful place, I thought. It had the tile around the fireplace and had the chandeliers, and it had been built by the McKamey family, and they were quite well-to-do people. And then our little house, was a little four or five room, five room house, I guess, that my grandfather built for us, and then there was our renters’ house, we call it, that the Wright family lived in. Then there was another house the Stringfield family lived in. Then there was several barns, one real big barn. And, you know, there was fenced and cattle and all like this, and they offered us for all that ten thousand five hundred dollars. And most people don’t know this, and I don’t seem to – I don’t hear it referred to much, but most of the people with any means at all took it to court, federal court in Knoxville. And they raised our price from – and I remember being at the court session over there – they raised the price from ten thousand to eighteen thousand, but even so, we were not able to buy even half that much land for what we got here, because when people moved from here, then the price of land appreciated, as you can expect when you take fifty-six thousand acres – is that what it was – and move them out, then you have a demand that exceeds the supply. You ask where we went. We went north of here, above Clinton, in the same place that I live now, right near Norris. So it was between where we lived originally, up above the Andersonville Boat Dock and down here, so we didn’t get out of the area too much. Now what was that question?
Mrs. Zucker: It doesn’t matter.
Mr. Irwin: You forgot it.
Mrs. Zucker: I forgot it. [laughter] No, I was interested – I once read your description of how you actually moved and the actual moving off that land was very difficult because it had to be done so quickly.
Mr. Irwin: Yeah, we had a lot of what they called it ‘small grain,’ that was wheat and oats and rye – not rye – wheat and oats and barley, and fifteen hundred bushel of corn. I don’t know why I remember that either. And a lot of cattle and mules and horses and you can imagine, hogs and all, trying to get a hundred head of hogs and cattle moved. You couldn’t find a truck, and hay and tobacco. We had barns full of hay that we moved, so we had this fellow, I guess Edmondson was the one. He would get mad; his truck wouldn’t run half the time, and the tires were worn out. So he got other tires to put on the tires, just stuck them over there, you know, and it would sound terrible running. He’d get mad trying to get his truck to run and throw his hammer and screwdriver and everything at the truck and kick it and pick up a hammer and beat it and curse it.
[laughter]
Mrs. Zucker: Did he ever shoot it?
[laughter]
Mr. Irwin: No, if he’d had a gun, I’m sure he would, but I remember, though, that one day my dad said – we’d bought this other place, the old Sam Hill place – and my dad said, “You know, we’re getting all this furniture up there and all the cattle and all the farming tools and everything else and there’s nobody up there to guard it.” It wasn’t a big problem up there for thieves and so forth, but still, when you have all of your pictures and everything else in the house, you have to think about it. So he asked me to go one day, he said, “Mr. Edmondson is leaving and taking a load of hay up there.” You heard of the guy that came to town on a load of hay. Well I left town on a load of hay, had to sit on the back of the truck, a big truck with hay stacked up on it. He says, “You can come back tomorrow.” Well, when I went up there, I stayed that night and they were bringing more and more things there, and spent the night with my uncle who had already moved up there, and slept on the floor, ’cause they had no beds up there. And then he said, “Well, you need to stay a week or two.” So it took them a week or two probably to get everything moved, two weeks, I’d say. So I never did come back, and I left on that load of hay. I never saw Oak Ridge as I saw it as a child for seven years, and when I came back, it was totally and absolutely –
Mrs. Zucker: Unrecognizable.
Mr. Irwin: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Mrs. Zucker: That must be a very strange feeling for a young boy.
Mr. Irwin: Well, I had trampled over up there with my grandfather and learned so much about the – I learned – don’t remember when I learned to tell a white oak from a chinquapin and all the rest, just as far as you could see them almost. He was a great old gentleman and talked to us and told us stories about how the hazelnut was used and when to get the fox grape or the possum grape and all this kind of thing, and so it was a beautiful place, I thought, the creeks and the hills and the mountains, and it was – I remember it – you know, I can only remember it as it was when I left.
Mrs. Zucker: When all the people began to arrive in Oak Ridge and employment possibilities opened for local people, did that create a big social change in the region? What was that like?
Mr. Irwin: Well people were moving and the whole atmosphere was already so different. I remember one fellow whose name – I’ll call him Lishy. That’s what they called him. Elisha was his name, and I don’t remember his last name very well, but he lived next to us, and he lived, had a very difficult time. He had several children and had no, really, no house. The farm next to us, which had belonged to the old Vice-President’s people – I’ll think of it momentarily. John Nash Garner. Thank you, Pat. You’re not as old as I am and you can remember those things better. The old Garner place was next to us, and he lived in a chicken house that they’d had and would work on the farm for us and other people. My dad paid him a dollar a day for about twelve hours. The going rate was seventy-five cents a day, and he like to work for my father and my uncles, because they paid him a little bit more. But at any rate, he, I remember, would go out with his children in the fields and his wife, and they would get out there by daylight and work until when they were hiring for the Meek family. They would work until about 11:30, and then his wife would trot home, barefooted, and cook dinner, had thirty minutes to cook dinner or lunch for the rest of them, and he went barefooted most of the time, Lishy did, and when I was up in the mountains, I could see his big barefoot tracks, even though there’s copperheads and all up there. Carried a pistol with him and he had been in a little trouble with the law, but he was one of the nicest gracious people I’ve known. How does that relate to your question? He heard that Elza Gate – that they were going to be hiring people and he walked from here up there and he came back and he’d got a job there as a laborer of some sort. And years and years later, when I was the Superintendent of Schools, he came to ask me a favor with regard to his children or something, and I said, “Lishy, are you still in Oak Ridge?” And he says, “Still working there.” I think he may have been the longest employed person here, because he started working when probably there wasn’t two dozen people, you know, when they just hired him to unload the things up there, but yeah, there was many other people that did get jobs here after they left. People were scattered in Blount County and Knox County and most of them stayed, I’d say ninety percent of them stayed within one of the adjoining counties eventually.
Mrs. Zucker: But I would think that the employment offered by Oak Ridge to people in the region would have made some kind of social movement, I mean, would have stretched the social situation in the county, too, because young – I know particularly when I was growing up, a lot of young women got excellent jobs at the lab, and that must have changed the view.
Mr. Irwin: Well, it did, I guess, but at the same time, that was a time that was changing, you know, everywhere, so I don’t know. The thing that I remember about the – was that the labor force – was that people were coming in and couldn’t get housing. There were literally people living in Bell County, Kentucky that drove down here and back every day, and a lot of them in Lee County, even up as far as Jonesboro [Tennessee]. And even North Carolina, and it would take, you know, about an hour and a half, a little more than that probably then, to come one way. But you couldn’t get any housing. People would rent if they had an extra room, if they wanted to, they could rent and get almost what they thought was unheard of, was unheard of, rent for – not just the people in the surrounding area, but people from foreign countries. There was a Finnish couple that rented a house from my neighbor, Campbell Sharp. My uncle, for example – all my people were farmers, but one of my uncles, they took a lot of pride in being their own boss and this kind of thing, but one of them got a job at K-25 when he moved to Andersonville, so he worked there for years and years at K-25.
Mrs. Zucker: How did people regard the invaders? You know, all these people came from all these different parts of the country. It must have been a strange lot when they wandered out into the county, and what were the feelings about that among people in the county?
Mr. Irwin: Well, everybody, most everybody that talks about this talks about the friction and the adversarial condition that developed between the county people and the Oak Ridge people, just like they did between the county people and the Norris people. But you know, I must say that I never really saw this. The people that were here, they didn’t want to leave, and I think they took it as sort of an inevitable kind of thing. Is that a Presbyterian belief that what will be will be?
Mrs. Zucker: What will be? So they were relatively accepting, okay. Now, where did you get your passion for education? You became an educator and you’re an educated man. In your family and the background that you came from, where did that push come from?
Mr. Irwin: Well, I was always interested – people assume that because you’re interested in one thing, and if you spend a lot of time on it, then they think that you – that that is your interest, and that, you know, that you don’t have interest in other things. I guess some of it, you know, it goes back to the old argument about heredity or environment, but I see people come to the museum all the time, and some of them will be so inspired that they’ll spend a day, and they’ll come back and they write letters and they do all kinds of things. It changes their life, sometimes, they say. And then, on the other hand, a lot of people walk through and they talk and so forth and when they get through, they don’t know any more about it than when they started. So a lot of that maybe is that innate kind of thing of being interested.
Mrs. Zucker: A curious person.
Mr. Irwin: Yeah.
Mrs. Zucker: But you spent a lot of years educating children and being concerned with their education. Did you see Oak Ridge as having any affect on the educational standards of the county? There wasn’t much interaction as I remember, but I’m curious about that. Or vice versa.
Mr. Irwin: Yeah, there was some interaction in the very beginning when, well later on, when Clinton was bombed, the Clinton School, which made worldwide news. Oak Ridge opened their facilities up for the people here, and then, of course, the big thing, probably, the big cooperation between the two entities was the County Commission, the ‘County Court,’ they called it back then, because they had squires, JPs, from here and from up out in the county, and I served on the county commission for quite a while, and I never really saw some of the – there was never any friction personally. Bob Jolly, of course, came a little bit later, but Bob Jolly came in 1960. And Clyde Claiborne and David Kirkland and many of those people, and they were all interested in the area. I just never did see that difference manifest of resentment and so forth. I never did see it. People talk about it all the time.
Mrs. Zucker: Well, I was wondering if there had been any positive effects of Oak Ridge on the county.
Mr. Irwin: Well, yeah, of course –
Mrs. Zucker: In terms of education.
Mr. Irwin: Well, from the standpoint of – it’s still being debated on – the standpoint of money, there’s an assumption that the federal government has agreed to that when you bring a lot of people into an area – and this sounds strange to you – but it becomes a burden on the county. And for years, the federal government has paid several hundred thousand dollars a year to the county, under, I call, Public Law H74. But, yeah, the interaction and the leadership and all, I think it’s been great. Gene Joyce, for example was one of the first to come here and Gene, I think, personifies the very best in the relationship between the county and Oak Ridge, and he was one of the first county attorneys, not just for Oak Ridge, but for the entire county.
Mrs. Zucker: I’d like to talk to you about the museum. Everybody does. But I wanted to plumb some of the other information about your background.
Mr. Irwin: [to the audience] How many of you have been to the Museum of Appalachia? Oh, very good. How come the rest of you didn’t come?
[laughter]
Mrs. Zucker: Start back with the beginning. I know you’ve told the story many, many times, but it’s always wonderful to hear about how the initial stages of the museum began for you.
Mr. Irwin: Well, first of all, I had no plans to open a museum. I mean, who is presumptuous enough to go out and say, you know, “I’m gonna start a museum,” if you don’t have anything to start it with, no money or no artifacts.
Mrs. Zucker: You and Selma Shapiro.
Mr. Irwin: Yeah, I was in the old school building when Selma and the Girl Scout girls – is that redundant? The Girl Scout children were starting to talk about a museum of some sort and I had this big long showcase. I’m not trying to take no credit, but I said, “Why don’t you take that in there.” And I had it full of odds and ends, you know, and then they became interested. Selma is not a very reticent, shy person, you know. You can tell her I said this.
Mrs. Zucker: And she said, “I’ll take it.”
Mr. Irwin: She reminds me, and this is in a positive way, about what the people used to say here, that if you had ducks out on the pond, if the turtle, a ‘mud turtle,’ we called it, ever got a hold of one’s feet or foot, trying to pull him under, that he would never turn loose until it thundered. Well, Selma, if she gets some project going, she will not turn loose whatever she’s wanted to do until it thundered, and sometimes she won’t turn loose after it thunders.
Mrs. Zucker: And I think you may share that, as a matter of fact. So how did you get off the ground with the Museum of Appalachia?
Mr. Irwin: Well, I guess, like anything else, there’s several things that I could mention, but first of all, I was always interested in the older people of the community. My Grandfather Rice was a fascinating man. He was an adventurer and was a coal miner as a child, and went out west and dug for Jesse James’ gold and was in the Oklahoma land opening, and fought down when Teddy Roosevelt was in Puerto Rico and Spanish American War, and stayed with the family of the Dalton Boys, the sister of the Dalton Boys and her husband, and came back and built a big house over in Knox County and stayed there for sixty years and farmed, but I learned, you know, I was interested to start with. I mean, I was always interested, same way with everything. So he knew and had a great respect and appreciation for his ancestors, as did some of my other people. So I had no idea of going into this. Somehow, I wanted to go into the diplomatic thing, and that’s why I got a Master’s degree in International Law and was going to Georgetown and so forth, but thought I’d teach a year before I did, and then I ended up staying with it. I went to an auction one day; it was the old Miller place down below the dam, and the Millers had been among the very first settlers here. I was Superintendent of the Schools at the time. And we worked five-and-a-half days; worked till noontime on Saturday, and I had a meeting every night, practically, sometimes three weeks without a single night home. But Saturday afternoon, I went up there and they had all these treasures from pioneer, frontier times laid out, you know, and people were buying the old wagon seat that the first Millers used when they came here, and I heard someone say they were gonna make a coffee table out of it, you know, put legs on it and all. Someone was buying the old – they had an old grist mill, and they were getting these measuring, wooden measuring handmade barrels, and they were going to shellac them and shine them up. And then I remember one thing in particular was a little handmade half-bushel measure that they started to sell, and someone said just in passing, one of the neighbors said, “They fished that out of the river during the Barn Creek Flood.” Well, I had always heard of this great devastating flood on a creek called Barren, B-A-R-R-E-N, I guess, but everybody called it ‘Barn Creek.’ And the river, the creek swept down through the hollows and drowned hundreds of horses and cattle and mules and twenty-one people were drowned in that little area, and many of them, dozens of them sat on top of their houses, or in trees during the night. But it was real sort of sad to me to say, well here’s something that connects the people with that flood. Here’s something that washed away and fifty miles downstream, somebody got it out and used it for, you know, fifty years or a hundred years. So I bought that and a few other things, and then they had the ox yoke. So that was sort of one of the things that I remember as being one of the first times that I began to think I’d want to save some of these things. My grandparents had given me a few things, and my Grandfather Rice gave me some old tools that could no longer be used, made by his great-grandfather, the man that built the old mill. And he said, “You and your brother,” – my brother David – said, “You might want to start a little museum someday.” Well, I didn’t even know what the word ‘museum’ meant at the time, you know. But those are the kind of things that, I guess, inspired me at the start.
Mrs. Zucker: Your museum is so unique, I think, not just because of the artifacts it contains, not just because of the important buildings and the construction and the layout, but the signage is particularly unique, the signage on all of your artifacts, which I always have a feeling is written by you. Is mostly written by you?
Mr. Irwin: All of it. It’s one thing – I’ve often said that if you take an object and you separate it from its history, then to a very great extent, you know, you’ve destroyed the item. So I have – now, when I get items, I never put them away until I put them in my office, which is piled to the ceiling, but I always write the history of it, who I got it from, who made it, who mended it and who kept it. I got something I was looking at last night that belonged to an old fellow by the name of Walter Lowe and I had – it was just an old handmade rake – but I pointed out that he lived in Smoky Junction and that he and about twelve other children were born in a little log cabin which Howard Baker – I suggested to him that he get it, and so he called me yesterday and said he’s interested in getting it – but Walter Lowe was a great hero in World War II. As a matter of fact, people referred to him as the Sergeant York of World War II, got more medals than anybody in the whole war, so they say. Well, that’s his little cabin up there, so this rake, to put it in the museum doesn’t mean much, but when you say that it belonged to Walter Lowe and how he walked twenty miles to join the Army, and, you know, all this kind of thing, then all of a sudden you look at it in a little different light. There’s so many of these things that I have and so many that I don’t have up, but that’s – I do get more comments on that than almost anything else, because it does make it a little more personal and meaningful, I guess.
Mrs. Zucker: Well, it’s inspired me at some point in my life to get trifocals, so I can read the signage, you know, and it works for me. How successful are you? I mean, how successful is the museum? Tell us a little bit about what its successes are.
Mr. Irwin: You can answer that two ways. I can tell you on the negative side that I’ve got tens of thousands of items stored up that I want to get out, and just what I think are classic, a lot of things of different sorts, and I’m doing the good and the bad. I bought an estate out down here near Louden one day – and still got that piled up – and one of the things that was in that was two old KKK Clans – whatever you call them – uniform?
Mrs. Zucker: Costumes?
Mr. Irwin: Robes. And so it was interesting to me because this is one of the more affluent families in the region, and they were doctors and married into the governor’s family and so forth, but when they came home from the funeral of one of their patriots one day, the KKK had invited – had cooked lots for them and all this kind of thing. So it’s dangerous to display something like that, but at the same time, if you don’t, then it’s a matter of censoring, you know, that kind of thing. You don’t just put out the best thing. So there’s so many of those things from a non-successful standpoint, when I walk around, anywhere I walk around, to any of the buildings, all I see are things that need to be done. Right now, and on the success side, you know, gosh, I would never have dreamed that all these things could have happened. For example, as we speak, I think, there’s a film company in Tokyo that’s showing a film on the museum. Same thing in Europe. All of you here, most all of you – maybe you not, Joan Ellen – can remember a lady by the name of Loretta Young. Remember her?
Mrs. Zucker: Had a big hat and came through the door. I can even remember the theme song.
Mr. Irwin: What was it?
Mrs. Zucker: [hums a tune] But anyway.
Mr. Irwin: You want to take over the show? Is that what you’re trying to do?
Mrs. Zucker: [slaps the table] Why not? I couldn’t do it.
Mr. Irwin: At any rate, what does she have to do with the success? As we are sitting here this afternoon, they’re coming back, Loretta Young’s son and his wife are filming the putting together of an old log house up in Virginia. So this is going to be shown on the history channel, and, you know, for the whole nation. And so we’ve been fortunate to have so many things like that. And the guy that’s going to be doing the narration, is it Smith? Harry, Howard Smith?
Mrs. Zucker: K, Howard K. Smith.
Mr. Irwin: Howard K. Smith. He’s going to be doing the narration, and will be up there for two or three weeks. Well, then last night we played for a good sized group of educators from all over the South. Last week we played, my band and I, for the National Convention of Smith & Wesson Collectors. Almost every day there’s an article that’s coming out in the Atlanta Constitution that – one of the largest papers in the country – with a lot of pictures and so forth about the museum. The Chattanooga Times has done one in a few days, and almost every day, some small magazine, like, I got the AAA, I’m getting it late, and they had a picture. Did you see that picture in there of Howard Baker shooting the anvil that we’ll be shooting? So from a success standpoint, but the thing about it that most museums that I’m familiar with would have a staff at least from ten to fifty times what we’ve got, and they would have a budget, the same thing. So I’m still raising potatoes and onions and eating them and working fifteen, eighteen hours a day and trying to keep the thing going. In the wintertime, though, you know, we lose about a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars every single day, and then you get so despondent because you think you’re never going to – then when summer comes, with the groups and all, you begin to sort of break even. I’m in the process, since you bring these personal things up, and have been for several years, to put the museum, and I’ve gotta do it quickly, not that I’m expecting to leave here, into a trust that will be there for henceforth and evermore. My daughter totally agrees with this, of giving it, in effect, giving it away, and we only have the one child now. We’ve lost one in a car wreck as you may know not long ago. But she’s in favor of this, and so it’s a most difficult thing. These things that I have walked miles to get and cherished so much, and they were mine and I’ve loved them and displayed them, then all of a sudden, they’re not going to belong to you anymore, you know. And it’s a really traumatic thing, even though I’ll have control, maybe, of the board, until we get to, you know how boards go, sometimes they can last a long time. So that’s what I’m trying to do, and there’s sort of tens of thousands of people whose lives are sort of presented there who otherwise would be totally forgotten. Just amazing at the fascinating people who are almost unknown in their respective regions, you know.
Mrs. Zucker: Now, at the beginning of this session, I preempted your talk that you were going to give, and I want to ask you if I have asked you enough questions that might have been answered by your talk, or whether you have some things that you really wished to say that I didn’t give you a chance to.
Mr. Irwin: Well, I’d like to go through my notes, and it’ll take about, I’d say, two or two-and-a-half hours.
[laughter]
Mrs. Zucker: Okay, how about fifteen minutes?
Mr. Irwin: No, I think you’ve done a good job asking the questions, and they may have some questions out here.
Mrs. Zucker: I have one more question to ask you and then, if we can manage it physically, we’ll give a try at asking John Rice some questions. Does your life surprise you?
Mr. Irwin: Yeah, I never had any, you know, any idea of being able to meet so many interesting people and great people and getting the recognition that we’ve got, hopefully, for the people. No, to give you an example, I remember when a congressman came to the area and I thought I knew somebody that knew the congressman personally, and I felt, you know, it was beyond any dream I had to ever know a congressman, or even a member of the state legislature. And one of the greatest thrills that I ever had was in Knoxville, when I rode up in one of the old hotels there with Archie Campbell, and that was the greatest thrill of my life. I don’t know whether you know who Archie Campbell was, a great entertainer, and later became one of my close and dear friends. But now, you know, they honored Howard Baker here a while back at Congress, and they had the meeting in the old Senate building. They had that meeting there for him and him only, and all of the senators gathered, and he was good enough to invite me and spent time talking to Ted Kennedy, for example, and to Monahan, and to Strom Thurmond and to all of those, Senator Byrd, he’s one of my favorites, old time fiddler from West Virginia. And just by the museum, people who come by there, well, of course, Alex Haley came by there for one afternoon and stayed for ten years, literally.
Mrs. Zucker: I’m sorry we don’t have time to talk about that chapter.
Mr. Irwin: Well, it’s a fascinating thing, and he did stay there and lived in there, had a little room in the back of our house, and it was so popular, but he never really knew how popular. But many of the great people whom I’ve known were not recognized. Alex Stewart, and I wrote the book about him, and I get more accolades, so many people have told me over and over again that that one book was a better contribution to mankind than the whole museum put together, and I get love letters about it almost daily, not because I wrote it, but because he, a so-called uneducated person was one of the best educated people that I’ve known. I asked him once if his granddaddy had much education. He said, “Yeah, he had a right good education, but he never went to school any,” and he was exactly right. You could ask any question and it would come out as if it was written by a poet and had been polished, you know. He said, for example, he said – I was asking him about the poverty conditions – he said, “A heap of people don’t know what hard times is, and a good neighbor is worth more than money.” I mean, he would roll those out, one after another.
Mrs. Zucker: Thank you so much.
Mr. Irwin: Well, it’s been a – either they’ve been real courteous and affable and receptive, or they’ve all been asleep, [laughter] because they just sit there.
Mrs. Zucker: I’ve looked around; they’re all wide awake.
Mr. Irwin: No, they are. I know that.
Mrs. Zucker: We have a few minutes left. Charlie, would you like to ask your question? Get up and yell, because –
Charlie: I thought you’d never get to this.
Mrs. Zucker: Get to your question? [laughs] Sorry about that.
Charlie: I wanted to ask Mr. Irwin if he had anything he could tell us about the legend of John Hendrix, and did John Hendrix really live and go out in the woods here for forty days and forty nights and predict Oak Ridge was coming, and why didn’t the county organize against it.
[laughter]
Mrs. Zucker: I have a feeling this microphone is not on. You might just check it. [to Mr. Irwin] Did you hear that? [to the audience] Did everybody hear that?
Mr. Irwin: Yeah, I must say that I never heard of John Hendrix while I was living here, and that I’m sure that there’s been a lot said about him and a lot written about him. I’ve got every article, I think, that’s ever been written about him. I knew his daughter, and I knew his granddaughter, rather, and I knew his son. I don’t want to be irreverent or anything, but his son was sort of, as preachers’ children are wont to be sometimes, a notorious rambler and so forth and was considered to be sort of the – I don’t want to put it too harshly, but he was always in trouble and hanging up around the beer joint and so forth, and he later was killed in a shootout, which didn’t surprise anyone, but as far as John was concerned, I can’t tell you any more than what’s been written about him that he supposedly did all these things.
Mrs. Zucker: Another question, if you can speak loudly, or, well, I just called on June Adamson over here I think.
[inaudible audience member speaks]
Mrs. Zucker: Did everybody hear that? June asked what the development of the word ‘Appalachia’ is and where it came from.
Mr. Irwin: Well June is a scholar and a writer and she knows as much about these things as I do, but that’s been kicked around for a long time. Everybody asks, you know, what the derivation is, and I guess the usual answer is that it’s an Indian name. But that’s pretty obvious that it is an Indian name.
[inaudible audience member speaks]
Mr. Irwin: Beg your pardon?
[inaudible audience member speaks]
Mr. Irwin: Well, okay. There was a tribe of Indians down, of all places, in northern Florida, in that area, and it was a tribe. They were called – I don’t remember how you spell it, but it was a derivation, I mean it was similar to Appalachia, Appalachi or something of this sort, and that group of Indians would forage in various areas and so forth, and ostensibly, they finally came up as far as northern Georgia, in what is part of Appalachia. They would come up there occasionally and people started referring to it, and I guess the other Indians as “That’s the Appalachia region down there,” meaning after that tribe of Indians down in Florida. Now the fellow that dug that up is named Davis, and he wrote a book about the development of the Appalachian region, and it’s the most documented book I’ve ever seen in my life. There’s a hundred, literally one hundred pages of bibliography, and ninety-five percent of people who write about any area, and so forth, just write about things they’ve heard or read, you know, without any basis at all, just totally worthless.
Audience member: Where can we get that book?
Mr. Irwin: Well, I just happen to have them for sale at the Museum of Appalachia.
[laughter]
Mr. Irwin: Why do you think I’m plugging it so much? He will be there, this guy will, at the homecoming, along with the other authors, and I’m just – I gave a copy of it to Lamar Alexander. I said, “You’ll like this book.” And he called me back and he said he’d read it through in, you know, a short period of time and thought it was one of the best too. So, he’s the one, I have to give this guy credit for that.
[inaudible audience member speaks]
Mr. Irwin: Well, you know, when the federal government set up the Appalachian Regional Commission, and people always ask me how to pronounce it. I have no idea, Appa-latch-ia, Appa-lay-chia or whatever. I’ve always called it Appa-latch-ia. When they set that up, they marked off parts, all or parts of thirteen states, including a little bit of the northeast part of Mississippi, around Booneville and in that section. I think maybe the reason there’s no mountains down there, it’s near the Natches Trail, maybe the reason they did that is that to get the Mississippi delegation to vote for it or something, you know, but you always have this problem when you talk about Appalachia. Do you talk about downtown Knoxville, Asheville, North Carolina?
[inaudible audience member speaks]
Mr. Irwin: Well, you said that I’m a musician. The committee’s still out discussing that question. But, no, it’s interesting you mentioned that, because I just finished a three hundred page book. A lot of these articles in the paper about it, in the Oak Ridger, ‘Irwin Book Reflects Tennessee Heritage.’ There’s a brand new book just out called A People and Their Music: The Story behind the Story of Country Music. And to me it’s a fascinating kind of thing, because all those great celebrities like Earl Scrubbs and Roy Acuff and Grandpa Jones and all the rest of them, they had national, international influence, Bill Monroe, everyone started out without any encouragement, you know, nobody encouraged them. Didn’t even have their own instruments, and they had to sneak to get somebody’s instrument to play, their daddy’s instrument or something. But it was unbelievably important in this area, because some of those songs would be inspiring, and how can you have this kind of a drudgery life, how can you work in the coal mines twelve hours a day, six days a week in a coal mine that’s that high, eighteen inches high, some of them are twelve inches high, and still, you know, have your wits about you? But the music did as much as anything else, and it would inspire. It would bring tears to people’s eyes. And as my daddy used to say, it would make the hair on the back of your neck stand up even.
Mrs. Zucker: That’s a good question. I’m glad you asked that, ’cause it was one of mine I never got to ask.
[inaudible audience member speaks]
Mr. Irwin: Yeah, I brought a lot of the brochures, but I left them in the car.
[laughter]
Mrs. Zucker: But there is an anvil shoot.
Mr. Irwin: Oh, the Fourth of July, we’re having, in addition to the anvil shoot, which by the way is being covered nationwide this year, we have a lot of other musicians up there and sheep herding and rail splitting and crosscuts. It’s sort of like – spinning wheel, cooking – it’s sort of like the [Tennessee] Homecoming used to be a miniature Homecoming, so it’s on the regular price, no extra charge, free parking, smile at the door.
Mrs. Zucker: I want to thank you so much.
Mr. Irwin: Well, I want to thank you, Sue and you and all of the folks for coming out on this beautiful summer day; it is now, summer, after the last few days.
[applause]

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ORICL Lecture Series
Lecture on Life in Early Oak Ridge
By John Rice Irwin
American Museum of Science & Energy
June 26, 2000
Announcer: Good morning and welcome to our class on ‘The Way We Were: Pre-Oak Ridge and Early Oak Ridge.’ This is the first of five sessions. The second one will be July, the 10th; we have to skip the 4th, and that’s followed July 17th, 24th, and 31st. And I recognize already some in the audience who are going to be on one of those panels. We’d like to thank the staff of the [American] Museum [of Science & Energy], because this changes their format in the morning when we use their auditorium. Also, the museum is going to be taping, videotaping for us, and I’m hoping that we can have one copy that we can have at the ORICL office so people could check it out, at least for a while. I would also like to thank our moderator, Joan Ellen Zucker, and I think a lot of you already know Joan Ellen (I’ve known her for years), because she is an early Oak Ridger from 1944, and I said, “Well, I’ll tell everybody you came here as a very young child.” And she’s been in local broadcasting since the 1950s. She is gonna introduce our speaker, and we’ll go from there.
Mrs. Zucker: I feel I should say, “Good morning class,” right? [laughter] No one could be better suited to open this course than our speaker, John Rice Irwin. He has been called Mr. Appalachia in many venues, and appropriately so. He’s perhaps done more than any man in our region to preserve and illuminate the culture of this beautiful part of the world. Born in Knox County, his family was forced in 1935 from their ancestral land in Union County by the rushing waters resulting from the building of Norris Dam. The Irwin family resettled to farmland in what we now call Gamble Valley, only to be ousted again by the Manhattan Project demands for the land which was to become Oak Ridge. Mr. Irwin was a soldier in Korea, earned a Bachelor’s Degree from Lincoln Memorial University with a major in Economics and History, and later earned a Master’s Degree in International Law from the University of Tennessee. From a career in teaching, he became a school principal and served three terms as superintendent of the Anderson County School System. He has been honored by colleges and universities for his devotion to the regional culture that is so dear to him. Most of you here today know him as the founder and director of the Museum of Appalachia in Norris, a museum many of us consider a totally unique and valuable living memoire dedicated to the people and history of our homeland, East Tennessee. But that’s his story and he will tell it, and it is my pleasure to introduce John Rice Irwin. Welcome.
[applause]
Mr. Irwin: Well thank you very much, thank you very much.
Mrs. Zucker: Because this course is called ‘The Way We Were,’ I’d like to go way back with you and start out by asking you to just start describing the physical images of the land that was here before Oak Ridge. What did it look like and what did it feel like?
Mr. Irwin: I’d spent all this time, Joan Ellen, making notes until the wee hours about what I was gonna say in this speech, and then she comes up and says she’s gonna ask me questions, see. [laughter]
Mrs. Zucker: I didn’t realize you’d made notes all night.
Mr. Irwin: If I don’t do well, it’ll be her fault. [laughter] I guess I will respond to that question, but I don’t come as an authority. Sometimes when people say nice things about you and so forth, you begin to believe them, you know, and when you’re asked questions about certain things, you begin to develop appropriate answers, whether you know about that which you’re talking or not. Is that good English?
Mrs. Zucker: Works for me.
[laughter]
Mr. Irwin: Okay. It reminded me of a – I was talking to Senator Howard Baker, who spoke down here last week, I guess it was, and ran into him two or three times, and last had lunch with him over at Regus. He wanted to go over there one more time before the Regus Institution in Knoxville closed. He was telling a story about – he was interested in the Civil War, and especially interested in aspects that had not been written in the history books, human interest type things, you know, and he kept hearing about this old man that claimed that he was in the Appomattox when General Lee surrendered to General Grant. And he finally got a chance to meet this old gentleman, and he said, “Well, tell me, I understand you were there when the Civil War ended.” He said, “Yeah, I was there. I was right there.” “Well, tell [me about it],” and Baker expected a long detailed description from this private who was standing over here as a guard or something, you know, and witnessed all this. So the old man said, “Well,” he said, “Lee walked out,” and said, “He took that sword off – grabbed that sword out and handed it to – or Lee walked up, took the sword out and handed it to Grant and said, ‘Here. Take the damn thing.’” [laughter] And that was the end of the story.
Mrs. Zucker: Is that what I’m doing to you?
Mr. Irwin: Well, later it turned out the old man had never even been there, you know, but he just imagined that Lee handed him the sword and, “Here. Take this damn thing. We’re through with it.” Well, how it was before it was is the question.
Mrs. Zucker: Well I just wanted to give the audience a feeling for the way the land was before we were all here. What was it like, you know.
Mr. Irwin: Well, I came here when I was five years old, and there was one little ribbon of a road that came through the area, and it was Highway 61, and roughly follows, more than roughly, I guess, the course of the present Turnpike. It was just a very narrow two-lane road and was the only, I’m pretty sure, the only paved road anywhere around. And when you came in at Elza Gate, there was just a – from there to here – there was one house (I noticed it a while ago) that’s still standing. When you come from the Clinton area into what is now Oak Ridge, there’s a little stone house on the left, and it had been built just before Oak Ridge. And interestingly, I remember hearing the owners say that what the government offered for that house and the land was less than what they had spent building the house, which was not uncommon. So I remember from that point there was a few farms, and down where the Oak Ridge, the AEC building, you call it, the big building on the left coming down? Is that what you call it?
Mrs. Zucker: Well, the Castle?
Audience Member: Federal Building.
Mr. Irwin: The Federal Building, Federal Building. Well, where it stands, there was a –some of the people – maybe I should go back just a little bit – my people settled in 1784 up this same valley. People don’t refer to valleys and ridges by the same names in different communities. Clinch River starts up around Blue Field, West Virginia – just below that, I guess – and it’s known as Clinch River all the way down. Powell River’s the same. The Mississippi River starts up in Minnesota, I guess, and it’s called the same. Valleys are not. Up in that area, we called it ‘Big Valley’; everybody did. And then when you get further down into this area, it was called something else. Same thing with the ridge: we called it ‘Big Ridge.’ And then when you get down into here, it was called ‘Pine Ridge.’ At any rate, my people settled in the same valley in that timeframe, and they lived there until 1935 when the dam was built. Seven hundred and thirty-five miles around the lake, the largest concrete dam in the world when it was built, they say. So it’s difficult to imagine what a traumatic thing it was for the people to have to leave their homes and their graveyards, and all the things that had belonged to their fathers, their great-grandfathers, and great-great-grandfathers. And the other thing was, of course, that they would – it was sorta like their whole world was coming to an end. So, many of them came to this area. My grandfather came here and lived in the old McKamey place. It was a beautiful place, I thought, sort of a pre-antebellum place, with the magnolia trees and the concrete walks, old, and the upping block out front and things of that sort. But our house was next to it, which we built, and it was just a small two or three-bedroom house. But the reason I go into all this is that those people from up in Union County, from Big Valley, from that flooded area, tended to come down here as sort of a colony. My grandfather and grandmother, and my uncle Marl and Roger – Roger owned a farm where the Oak Ridge Hospital is now located. And at that time, he owned all that land back in there. It wasn’t worth anything much, but I went down to see my aunt a few months ago in the Oak Ridge Hospital. She was in there; lacked a year being a hundred years old. And I never called – for some reason, we called our aunts – some of them, our aunts and uncles, we put that title – but we just called her ‘Marie,’ and she was lying there in that hospital, large hospital in the middle of a big town, and I said, “Marie, do you know where you are?” And she said, “I reckon I do. I’m back to my old homeplace.” In addition to those people, I had several cousins. Handy Stooksbury lived, as I was saying, starting to say, where the Federal Building is now located. It was sort of a poor rocky farm, and he had several children. Some of them are still living over in this area. Some of them are living in Oak Ridge, I think. And he, like everyone else, had a difficult time during the depression. I remember one time – he never had an automobile – but he raised a little tobacco, and they say that it takes thirteen months to raise tobacco. You start sowing your bed in January; you’re burning your bed to get rid of all the seeds and weeds and so forth. I hope you don’t have too many questions.
Mrs. Zucker: No, you’re answering them all. Got ’em all on a piece of paper and you’re just answering them.
Mr. Irwin: You know, this goes to, I think, what you’re asking. He raised this tobacco crop and then the kids were getting ready, perhaps gone back to school, and he had five or six girls and two boys, and they were all looking forward to getting new shoes and clothes, or getting any shoes at all, I guess, from the tobacco crop, and anything they wanted, you know, for Christmas and whatever, it was all hinging on the money that they got from selling the tobacco over in Knoxville. Well, it wasn’t a real good year, and it didn’t do too well, but they tended it and worked all summer on it, and the kids helped, the children helped to hand it off, grading it. At that time you had to separate it into seven grades: trash, light red, dark red, lugs, cutters, and tips. I can remember that, but I can’t remember where I parked out front. [laughter]
Mrs. Zucker: Well, we don’t want you to leave so you can’t go back to the parking lot.
Mr. Irwin: Yeah. So he had to hire – and, of course, he tried to take it to Knoxville, and they charged to sell it. And when he paid people for loading it and the truck driver taking it over there and then the fee for selling it, he didn’t get enough money for it to pay for selling it. So he came back home and all the kids were, you know, running at the door, and he had to tell them, you know, that he didn’t end up with any money at all. And he was a hardworking fellow. We used to play there on his place. They were cousins of ours, and there was an old mulberry tree there, and it’s still there, I think, and it was big and hollow at the time, about, it seems like that big [holds arms out wide] and we would hide in that tree when we were playing hide-and-seek, you know. And it was a mulberry tree, and I think the reason, perhaps, that that mulberry tree was there, and we had – my grandfather had a couple of big mulberry trees – that at one time it was thought that the silk industry was going to be an important industry in Tennessee, and people started raising silk[worms]. One of my ancestors, ‘Raccoon’ John Miller, introduced silkworms into Knoxville for – had planted mulberry trees, and according to the Knoxville Gazette in – I think it was 1795, 1795 there were a few people there – he was talking about the article, mentioned that Captain Miller had raised so many pounds of silk and it took almost – and he did it without any labor, because it was processed by women and children, so no labor involved. [laughter]
Mrs. Zucker: Can I ask you where you sold things? I mean, what were the centers of commerce?
Mr. Irwin: Well, Knoxville, when we talked about going to town, we talked about going to Knoxville, and sometimes, well, often to Clinton.
Mrs. Zucker: So that’s where your tobacco was purchased? In Knoxville mostly?
Mr. Irwin: But true sold it, yeah, in Knoxville, but in the big warehouses in Knoxville.
Mrs. Zucker: How’d you get it there?
Mr. Irwin: Well, there were trucks. There was two trucks, two people that owned trucks in the area. One was Wylie Cassidy, who lived up on what’s called ‘Peach Orchard’ later on. They still call it that?
Mrs. Zucker: Yep, they do.
Mr. Irwin: And Wylie had a big peach orchard there and people would tend to go in there of a night and with the grass sacks, burlap bags, you would call them, and fill them up with those peaches and go out and ostensibly make it into peach brandy. The other truck driver – I could get off on that whole thing there – but the other guy was a man by the name of Edmondson. So, during the war when we had to move, everything was rationed, tires and so forth, so that made it very difficult to move out. But there was about, in that colony that my grandfather – I guess he was sort of the titular leader, and he – there was about twelve or fifteen families. I think the land we’re sitting on now belonged to Connard Stooksbury. But he built a church which stood until just a few years ago there off, just right off the Turnpike.
Mrs. Zucker: What was your family’s socioeconomic position? Were you better off than some people? Were you less well-off? What was your status?
Mr. Irwin: Well, I asked this old man – I won’t get into that. You could answer that two different ways. Here’s a photograph of my – you can’t see it very well, but my grandfather and grandmother and their five children that was taken here in the yard and they’re dressed up in their Sunday best and they look like very affluent people, and their house looked very affluent.
Mrs. Zucker: And handsome.
Mr. Irwin: And then this is the little house that we lived in. But everything is relative, you know. If you passed the home, it would have, I think, been impressive, the boxwoods, and, as I said a while ago, the magnolias and the big upping block out front. But we had three hundred and twenty-five acres of land, and two or three rental, we called them, not tenant houses, but renter houses. But the people lived there, I don’t think they ever paid any rent, but they worked some on the farm. But on the other hand, we lived in an economic condition that was comparable to the Middle Ages or even before. There were people living in Italy that were living better before Christ than we were living here. I just got back from Italy, and Pompeii, for example, you’ve been there, I’m sure, some of you, and they had running water, which we didn’t have. They had a sewer system, which we didn’t have. So we raised everything we ate, practically. We raised wheat and we had it ground and took it down to Lenoir City to a big mill, crossed the river on a ferry, and that flour would last us an entire year. You can’t do corn that way, because the meal will become musty and molded, so we took it out to McWayne’s corn mill. And we raised all of our vegetables and canned them and dried them, and my grandmother had a big cannow, she called it and all summer she was canning beans, especially and beats and kraut and every vegetable that you could think of. So we had no, in our house, we had no running water, we had no telephone, we had no electricity, and when you say you have no electricity, that says a lot. We had to carry the water, our drinking water, from a quarter of a mile away. So even though we were better off than a lot of people, we still were living frugally, and we would have no matter how much my parents and my grandparents – they never changed their way of living even though later on they could have.
Mrs. Zucker: What was the center of your family culture? Was it the church, was it music, was it family life in the evening? How would you describe that?
Mr. Irwin: Well, of course the church was the – there was Baptist churches, and I think we may have had the only Methodist church that my grandfather built, and that was – in addition to the religious center, it was also the social center, as you can imagine. My grandmother went to church, I think, almost every Sunday, but sometimes when she was having a lot of people to eat, sometimes as many as thirty-five on Sunday, and she had to start catching – my brother and I had to start catching the chickens the day before, and she would ring their necks, and she was picking the beans on Saturday and baking all the cakes and pies for the thirty-five people that were going to be there on Sunday, so on this particular occasion, I remember that she didn’t do because all these people were coming. This gives you a little idea of – she said she was wondering if the people at church missed her, you know, and she said, “Well, who was there? Was so-and-so there? Was Ike there? Was Bert there and Handy there?” and so forth, and she kept talking, expecting them to say, “Well, they were asking about you,” and they never did, you know. And finally she said, “Anybody ask about me?” And so that’s what she was getting at all along. So it was a social thing, and the one thing that has been alluded to, I think, before is the fact that there was no kind of recreation, of course.
Mrs. Zucker: So how did you play?
Mr. Irwin: Well, who said you were supposed to play? [laughter]
Mrs. Zucker: Okay, fair enough.
Mr. Irwin: As kids, you know, we had these games, ‘fox and dog,’ and we’d run up in the loft and jump off and this kind of thing, but the great social event was getting together and talking. On Sunday afternoon, the people in Knoxville, our cousins, would come out and sit out in the front yard of Grandpa’s and Granny’s house and tell stories. Told the same story over and over again, but they were always funny. Everybody knew the stories that were going to be told, but that’s – when they told them – Uncle Lee Irwin was a great fiddler and a lot of other people in Knoxville came out. And then on of a night, a lot of times the men would gather on the front porch and the women would be in the kitchen somewhere, and they would do nothing but talk. And when we thought – we knew that one of these things were coming about, it would never have occurred to us, what are we going to do? Are we gonna have coffee and cakes or this and that? We just got together and talked and one person would talk and another one would pick it up and so forth, and I would sit and listen to this, especially when my grandfather talked about the stories. He was born in 1861, so he could remember people who were here when the country was formed, you know. So it’s a very young nation, and to have him to talk about his great uncles and all and the Revolutionary War, why it sort of gave you a perspective of the country’s history, I guess.
Mrs. Zucker: Where did your family immigrate from? Do you have any idea? Irwin sounds English.
Mr. Irwin: Well, it’s an amalgamation, I guess, a mixture. The Irwin family came from Scotland. There’s a town there named Irwin in Scotland, spelled the same way. They went to, later, went to Ireland and, of course, the people in Northern Ireland are called Scots Irish and most of those people are Scotch. ‘Scots,’ not ‘Scotch,’ they tell me. Scotch also, but also Scots. And I was descended from the Longmeyers, which is English. The Stooksburys, which are also English, there’s a little town down below London called Stokesbury, and the Sharps, interestingly, there were hundreds of thousands of Sharps that were descended from those five brothers that settled up there, and the Sharp name is German, although you would think it would be English, and if it’s spelled Sharp, it is English, I guess, but originally it was spelled Scharf, S-C-H-A-R-F, or something close to that. So they were all German. The Graves, G-R-A-V-E-S, sounds English, but it also was German, because it was spelled G-R-A-F-F-S or something, Graffs. Miller, sounds very English; it also was German. It was Mueller. So all of our – and the Rices were Welsh.
Mrs. Zucker: Is that typical of the mixture that settled this region?
Mr. Irwin: Well, I think so. Most people say that it was settled by the Scotch Irish and the nobel independent suffrelite people and so forth, but I think most of the early rosters would indicate that there was more English names than there were anything else, and a lot of the German has certainly been underestimated.
Mrs. Zucker: Listening to the names that you have just listed, they’re all names that are – many of them are still names that exist in the county, Stooksbury and Longmeyer, these are all names that are familiar to me having lived in Norris for some years, so they’re still the people of Anderson County that you are describing.
Mr. Irwin: They say that there’s so many Stooksburys, they say that the Stookburys and the crabgrass are taking everything over.
[laughter]
Mrs. Zucker: Do you have any memory about the first move when TVA ousted you? You were a little boy, I know.
Mr. Irwin: Are you talking about here?
Mrs. Zucker: Yeah, here. Your first move was ‘encouraged’ by TVA, but the building of Norris Dam. Do you have any memory of that? You must have been five years old or something.
Mr. Irwin: Are you talking about when I came here from Union County?
Mrs. Zucker: Yeah, that first time.
Mr. Irwin: Well, I have just vague recollections. I remember the trauma and wondering why the people were so upset and all. They told the story of my great aunt – Rufus Rice, who built the old grist mill that you’re familiar with in Norris, and his wife. And when we started to buy the land where Norris Lake is now located, she was very much opposed to it, very saddened, and a fellow by the name of Marshall was in charge of purchasing the land. And after a while, he would visit back and forth, and he gained the friendship of Uncle Rufy Rice, who was born in 1858 and was out in the west with Teddy Roosevelt, and he had a fabulous career. But Aunt Nan was her name, and she said, “Well, my greatest dreams and my only hope is that I can live here the rest of my life,” said, “I have three babies buried up there under the cedar trees, and all of my ancestors are buried here, and this is all that we’ve ever known.” And then she said, “But if you think that it – you say it’s gonna help a lot of people, and it’s gonna be good for the country,” and she said, “I’m ready to go.” And Uncle Rufy – they wanted to buy the old mill that was built in the 1700s by his ancestor and my ancestor. It was still in operation for many years. For decades, it was pictured in the World Book Encyclopedia as the type of thing representing the beginning of the industrial revolution, the wooden cogs and the gears and the power from the water wheel. So he said, “I’m not sellin’ it to TVA. I don’t like TVA.” And Mr. Marshall said, “Well, Rufy, you’re gonna have to move and you’re gonna have to do something with the mill. What are you gonna do with it?” He said, “Well, I’m not gonna let TVA have it.” And he said, “Well, you know, again, what are you gonna do with it?” And he said, “I’m gonna give it to you.” And Marshall said, “Now, you understand, if you give it to me, you know, what I’m gonna have to do with it. I’m gonna have to give it to TVA.” He said, “I don’t want to hear that. I’m not givin’ it to TVA; I’m giving it to you, and I don’t want to know what you did with it.” So he could live with himself by saying that. So those were the kind of things I remember when we first moved from up there down here.
Mrs. Zucker: Now, electricity did make an enormous difference. Did it make a huge difference in your life?
Mr. Irwin: Well, we never had it down here.
Mrs. Zucker: You never got it after TVA produced it?
Mr. Irwin: You know, I have been in years past a great proponent of TVA and a great defender. I think it was one of the best run organizations in America, federal organizations, and it’s gone from that to the total opposite now, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t get into that political aspect.
Mrs. Zucker: That’s another lecture.
Mr. Irwin: Another lecture, which people don’t want to hear. But at any rate, we moved within three quarters of a mile from where the electric lines ran, and for seven years we tried to get electricity. I’m not saying this in order to prove any point. I’m saying it because it was true. We made all kinds of – and my people did all kinds of inquiries and so forth about getting electricity to run that half a mile for several homes over there. And then they said, well, we’d have to agree to take so many things, a refrigerator and so many lights and all that kind of thing. And my people agreed with all that, but when we left here, we still had not had electricity in our homes.
Mrs. Zucker: I want to make a big leap now over a lot of years and ask you about the second eviction in your life, which leads us into Oak Ridge history. What’s the first thing you remember about the coming of the great event. What were the first rustlings in the county?
Mr. Irwin: Well, I heard, and we all heard, that they were building some sort of a little spur line off the railroad up at Elza Gate. They still call it Elza Gate?
Mrs. Zucker: Yes, they do. We don’t use it anymore much. I mean, the Elza underpass is –
Mr. Irwin: But you all know where it is.
Mrs. Zucker: Yeah.
Mr. Irwin: They were building this little line, sidetrack, off of the railroad there, and started unloading equipment and people were talking about what they were doing, and nobody knew, and that was the first thing. The second thing, over in front of our house, and we lived on, well, you know where Liz’s Market used to be?
Mrs. Zucker: [to the audience] Everybody know where that is?
Mr. Irwin: We lived close to that. It was totally different country at the time. And over in front of our house, people started to come in. Surveyors came in. As a matter of fact, I have in the museum one of the first supposedly transit and so forth that was used here. And they started surveying everywhere, everywhere you’d go, there’d be surveyors out. Of course, all the oldtimers here were going out and asking them what they were doing, thinking that they knew. Of course they didn’t know any more than we did. One of their stock answers was that they were gonna build a big ball diamond down here, a World Series and all this kinda thing.
Mrs. Zucker: Every kid in the county was excited when they heard that, I bet.
Mr. Irwin: Yeah. And then the third thing that I remember in the very early stages, that they were building something over in front of our house. Looked like a fortification of some sort. And I think it was a place to store munitions and blasting powder and things of that sort. But those were some of the very first – everybody was speculating. A lot of the older people were saying that when the Indians left here, that they had told the white people, the settlers, that there was enough gold and silver buried in this area to shoe their horses, and the older people were saying that the federal government, Uncle Sam, had found out where this was buried and was gonna get all of us outta here so they could come in and get that gold and silver.
Mrs. Zucker: Unfortunately that wasn’t true, right?
Mr. Irwin: Well, I don’t know, maybe they did. There was supposedly some gold and silver buried on our farm by an old fellow supposedly by the name of Collins Roberts, after which Robertsville took its name. People would come there in the ’30s and dig and slip in there of a night and dig for that gold.
Mrs. Zucker: Well, do you remember the moment when your family learned that you were going to be moved and the reactions to that?
Mr. Irwin: When we came home from Nash Copeland’s store, most of you, you knew Nash Copeland, didn’t you? He was a merchant here. Then he was a prominent citizen and sort of the spokesmen for the people who lived here, and he died, what, a couple of years ago, I guess. He has a son living here. I think Bobby, and some others maybe. But we’d been to the store that day and we came home and saw this little piece of paper that was tied to the – attached someway to the screen door of the front porch. And it was a notice. I remember that my father and mother, what a strange and disturbing look they had on their faces when they read it. And the essence of it was that we had, I think it was two weeks to get out. I have a copy, not of that one, but of another eviction notice that said, “The government is planning to take this property. You have fourteen days to vacate the premises.” And it was that terse and unapologetic, you know, kind of thing.
Mrs. Zucker: That must have been such a terrible shock to your family and to all the other families in the region.
Mr. Irwin: Yeah, they had a meeting. I think this was interesting. At the time, the congressman from this area was John Jennings, and at that time, the office of Congress was viewed with a great deal more respect and we thought that there’s nothing that a congressman couldn’t do. I mean you get to the congressman, that’s almost the deity Himself. And we had a meeting down at Robertsville Church House, and I was there, and what I remember most is these people getting up and I guess sort of testifying. I remember one lady got up and said that her grandfather, I guess it was her grandfather, or great-grandfather, I think it was her grandfather, came here in an oxcart from North Carolina, and they’d cleared the land and worked it and improved it and picked the rocks off of it and spent generations improving it, and they just didn’t want to leave. They didn’t know where they would go. I mean, most of the people in this area was not widely traveled, and just to say, you know, “You gotta move” – and I remember other people getting up and begging Congressman Jennings to do something, and he didn’t – I’m not sure that he himself knew what the purpose of it was – but he, of course, didn’t take away their hopes, and left the impression that he might do something about it.
Mrs. Zucker: Do you know how much you got paid? What was the going rate for farmland, the Oak Ridge Reservation, as we used to call it?
Mr. Irwin: Well, there was an old lady, a black lady that lived up on the ridge from us, and Nash Copeland knew the details better than I did, but she had a little cabin, and she had enough ground to raise potatoes, enough potatoes to do her all year, and onions and a little corn, and raised – had a cow for her milk and butter, and was, you know, got along quite well and was happy. And they appraised her land based on the going per acre rate, which was very, very little. And Nash said that when she had to try to hire a truck to take the cow somewhere else and the chattels and the few pieces of furniture and the plows and things like that, that she didn’t get enough out of the land – I think it was between two and three hundred dollars that they paid for her house and her land, and by the time she got through having her things hauled out, she didn’t have but maybe a hundred dollars or less.
Mrs. Zucker: Where did these people go? Where did your family go? How did everybody find places to relocate?
Mr. Irwin: We went straight up the valley. Let me ask you – you asked about – before I forget – you remember that question.
Mrs. Zucker: All right.
Mr. Irwin: You asked about how much we got. How much the land was – that was one extreme. We had, as I said, three hundred and twenty-five acres, which is quite a little bit of property. It went from the top of the mountain over here. [points to his right] Am I pointing the right way? Sorta that way? Which way?
Mrs. Zucker: Probably that way. [to the audience] Anybody know? Which ridge?
Mr. Irwin: Pine Ridge, Y-12’s across it.
Mrs. Zucker: Oh, then you were pointing the right direction.
Mr. Irwin: Then from there, all the way over to, well, nearly a mile in the other direction. But at any rate, we had this, my grandfather’s house, which was really a beautiful place, I thought. It had the tile around the fireplace and had the chandeliers, and it had been built by the McKamey family, and they were quite well-to-do people. And then our little house, was a little four or five room, five room house, I guess, that my grandfather built for us, and then there was our renters’ house, we call it, that the Wright family lived in. Then there was another house the Stringfield family lived in. Then there was several barns, one real big barn. And, you know, there was fenced and cattle and all like this, and they offered us for all that ten thousand five hundred dollars. And most people don’t know this, and I don’t seem to – I don’t hear it referred to much, but most of the people with any means at all took it to court, federal court in Knoxville. And they raised our price from – and I remember being at the court session over there – they raised the price from ten thousand to eighteen thousand, but even so, we were not able to buy even half that much land for what we got here, because when people moved from here, then the price of land appreciated, as you can expect when you take fifty-six thousand acres – is that what it was – and move them out, then you have a demand that exceeds the supply. You ask where we went. We went north of here, above Clinton, in the same place that I live now, right near Norris. So it was between where we lived originally, up above the Andersonville Boat Dock and down here, so we didn’t get out of the area too much. Now what was that question?
Mrs. Zucker: It doesn’t matter.
Mr. Irwin: You forgot it.
Mrs. Zucker: I forgot it. [laughter] No, I was interested – I once read your description of how you actually moved and the actual moving off that land was very difficult because it had to be done so quickly.
Mr. Irwin: Yeah, we had a lot of what they called it ‘small grain,’ that was wheat and oats and rye – not rye – wheat and oats and barley, and fifteen hundred bushel of corn. I don’t know why I remember that either. And a lot of cattle and mules and horses and you can imagine, hogs and all, trying to get a hundred head of hogs and cattle moved. You couldn’t find a truck, and hay and tobacco. We had barns full of hay that we moved, so we had this fellow, I guess Edmondson was the one. He would get mad; his truck wouldn’t run half the time, and the tires were worn out. So he got other tires to put on the tires, just stuck them over there, you know, and it would sound terrible running. He’d get mad trying to get his truck to run and throw his hammer and screwdriver and everything at the truck and kick it and pick up a hammer and beat it and curse it.
[laughter]
Mrs. Zucker: Did he ever shoot it?
[laughter]
Mr. Irwin: No, if he’d had a gun, I’m sure he would, but I remember, though, that one day my dad said – we’d bought this other place, the old Sam Hill place – and my dad said, “You know, we’re getting all this furniture up there and all the cattle and all the farming tools and everything else and there’s nobody up there to guard it.” It wasn’t a big problem up there for thieves and so forth, but still, when you have all of your pictures and everything else in the house, you have to think about it. So he asked me to go one day, he said, “Mr. Edmondson is leaving and taking a load of hay up there.” You heard of the guy that came to town on a load of hay. Well I left town on a load of hay, had to sit on the back of the truck, a big truck with hay stacked up on it. He says, “You can come back tomorrow.” Well, when I went up there, I stayed that night and they were bringing more and more things there, and spent the night with my uncle who had already moved up there, and slept on the floor, ’cause they had no beds up there. And then he said, “Well, you need to stay a week or two.” So it took them a week or two probably to get everything moved, two weeks, I’d say. So I never did come back, and I left on that load of hay. I never saw Oak Ridge as I saw it as a child for seven years, and when I came back, it was totally and absolutely –
Mrs. Zucker: Unrecognizable.
Mr. Irwin: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Mrs. Zucker: That must be a very strange feeling for a young boy.
Mr. Irwin: Well, I had trampled over up there with my grandfather and learned so much about the – I learned – don’t remember when I learned to tell a white oak from a chinquapin and all the rest, just as far as you could see them almost. He was a great old gentleman and talked to us and told us stories about how the hazelnut was used and when to get the fox grape or the possum grape and all this kind of thing, and so it was a beautiful place, I thought, the creeks and the hills and the mountains, and it was – I remember it – you know, I can only remember it as it was when I left.
Mrs. Zucker: When all the people began to arrive in Oak Ridge and employment possibilities opened for local people, did that create a big social change in the region? What was that like?
Mr. Irwin: Well people were moving and the whole atmosphere was already so different. I remember one fellow whose name – I’ll call him Lishy. That’s what they called him. Elisha was his name, and I don’t remember his last name very well, but he lived next to us, and he lived, had a very difficult time. He had several children and had no, really, no house. The farm next to us, which had belonged to the old Vice-President’s people – I’ll think of it momentarily. John Nash Garner. Thank you, Pat. You’re not as old as I am and you can remember those things better. The old Garner place was next to us, and he lived in a chicken house that they’d had and would work on the farm for us and other people. My dad paid him a dollar a day for about twelve hours. The going rate was seventy-five cents a day, and he like to work for my father and my uncles, because they paid him a little bit more. But at any rate, he, I remember, would go out with his children in the fields and his wife, and they would get out there by daylight and work until when they were hiring for the Meek family. They would work until about 11:30, and then his wife would trot home, barefooted, and cook dinner, had thirty minutes to cook dinner or lunch for the rest of them, and he went barefooted most of the time, Lishy did, and when I was up in the mountains, I could see his big barefoot tracks, even though there’s copperheads and all up there. Carried a pistol with him and he had been in a little trouble with the law, but he was one of the nicest gracious people I’ve known. How does that relate to your question? He heard that Elza Gate – that they were going to be hiring people and he walked from here up there and he came back and he’d got a job there as a laborer of some sort. And years and years later, when I was the Superintendent of Schools, he came to ask me a favor with regard to his children or something, and I said, “Lishy, are you still in Oak Ridge?” And he says, “Still working there.” I think he may have been the longest employed person here, because he started working when probably there wasn’t two dozen people, you know, when they just hired him to unload the things up there, but yeah, there was many other people that did get jobs here after they left. People were scattered in Blount County and Knox County and most of them stayed, I’d say ninety percent of them stayed within one of the adjoining counties eventually.
Mrs. Zucker: But I would think that the employment offered by Oak Ridge to people in the region would have made some kind of social movement, I mean, would have stretched the social situation in the county, too, because young – I know particularly when I was growing up, a lot of young women got excellent jobs at the lab, and that must have changed the view.
Mr. Irwin: Well, it did, I guess, but at the same time, that was a time that was changing, you know, everywhere, so I don’t know. The thing that I remember about the – was that the labor force – was that people were coming in and couldn’t get housing. There were literally people living in Bell County, Kentucky that drove down here and back every day, and a lot of them in Lee County, even up as far as Jonesboro [Tennessee]. And even North Carolina, and it would take, you know, about an hour and a half, a little more than that probably then, to come one way. But you couldn’t get any housing. People would rent if they had an extra room, if they wanted to, they could rent and get almost what they thought was unheard of, was unheard of, rent for – not just the people in the surrounding area, but people from foreign countries. There was a Finnish couple that rented a house from my neighbor, Campbell Sharp. My uncle, for example – all my people were farmers, but one of my uncles, they took a lot of pride in being their own boss and this kind of thing, but one of them got a job at K-25 when he moved to Andersonville, so he worked there for years and years at K-25.
Mrs. Zucker: How did people regard the invaders? You know, all these people came from all these different parts of the country. It must have been a strange lot when they wandered out into the county, and what were the feelings about that among people in the county?
Mr. Irwin: Well, everybody, most everybody that talks about this talks about the friction and the adversarial condition that developed between the county people and the Oak Ridge people, just like they did between the county people and the Norris people. But you know, I must say that I never really saw this. The people that were here, they didn’t want to leave, and I think they took it as sort of an inevitable kind of thing. Is that a Presbyterian belief that what will be will be?
Mrs. Zucker: What will be? So they were relatively accepting, okay. Now, where did you get your passion for education? You became an educator and you’re an educated man. In your family and the background that you came from, where did that push come from?
Mr. Irwin: Well, I was always interested – people assume that because you’re interested in one thing, and if you spend a lot of time on it, then they think that you – that that is your interest, and that, you know, that you don’t have interest in other things. I guess some of it, you know, it goes back to the old argument about heredity or environment, but I see people come to the museum all the time, and some of them will be so inspired that they’ll spend a day, and they’ll come back and they write letters and they do all kinds of things. It changes their life, sometimes, they say. And then, on the other hand, a lot of people walk through and they talk and so forth and when they get through, they don’t know any more about it than when they started. So a lot of that maybe is that innate kind of thing of being interested.
Mrs. Zucker: A curious person.
Mr. Irwin: Yeah.
Mrs. Zucker: But you spent a lot of years educating children and being concerned with their education. Did you see Oak Ridge as having any affect on the educational standards of the county? There wasn’t much interaction as I remember, but I’m curious about that. Or vice versa.
Mr. Irwin: Yeah, there was some interaction in the very beginning when, well later on, when Clinton was bombed, the Clinton School, which made worldwide news. Oak Ridge opened their facilities up for the people here, and then, of course, the big thing, probably, the big cooperation between the two entities was the County Commission, the ‘County Court,’ they called it back then, because they had squires, JPs, from here and from up out in the county, and I served on the county commission for quite a while, and I never really saw some of the – there was never any friction personally. Bob Jolly, of course, came a little bit later, but Bob Jolly came in 1960. And Clyde Claiborne and David Kirkland and many of those people, and they were all interested in the area. I just never did see that difference manifest of resentment and so forth. I never did see it. People talk about it all the time.
Mrs. Zucker: Well, I was wondering if there had been any positive effects of Oak Ridge on the county.
Mr. Irwin: Well, yeah, of course –
Mrs. Zucker: In terms of education.
Mr. Irwin: Well, from the standpoint of – it’s still being debated on – the standpoint of money, there’s an assumption that the federal government has agreed to that when you bring a lot of people into an area – and this sounds strange to you – but it becomes a burden on the county. And for years, the federal government has paid several hundred thousand dollars a year to the county, under, I call, Public Law H74. But, yeah, the interaction and the leadership and all, I think it’s been great. Gene Joyce, for example was one of the first to come here and Gene, I think, personifies the very best in the relationship between the county and Oak Ridge, and he was one of the first county attorneys, not just for Oak Ridge, but for the entire county.
Mrs. Zucker: I’d like to talk to you about the museum. Everybody does. But I wanted to plumb some of the other information about your background.
Mr. Irwin: [to the audience] How many of you have been to the Museum of Appalachia? Oh, very good. How come the rest of you didn’t come?
[laughter]
Mrs. Zucker: Start back with the beginning. I know you’ve told the story many, many times, but it’s always wonderful to hear about how the initial stages of the museum began for you.
Mr. Irwin: Well, first of all, I had no plans to open a museum. I mean, who is presumptuous enough to go out and say, you know, “I’m gonna start a museum,” if you don’t have anything to start it with, no money or no artifacts.
Mrs. Zucker: You and Selma Shapiro.
Mr. Irwin: Yeah, I was in the old school building when Selma and the Girl Scout girls – is that redundant? The Girl Scout children were starting to talk about a museum of some sort and I had this big long showcase. I’m not trying to take no credit, but I said, “Why don’t you take that in there.” And I had it full of odds and ends, you know, and then they became interested. Selma is not a very reticent, shy person, you know. You can tell her I said this.
Mrs. Zucker: And she said, “I’ll take it.”
Mr. Irwin: She reminds me, and this is in a positive way, about what the people used to say here, that if you had ducks out on the pond, if the turtle, a ‘mud turtle,’ we called it, ever got a hold of one’s feet or foot, trying to pull him under, that he would never turn loose until it thundered. Well, Selma, if she gets some project going, she will not turn loose whatever she’s wanted to do until it thundered, and sometimes she won’t turn loose after it thunders.
Mrs. Zucker: And I think you may share that, as a matter of fact. So how did you get off the ground with the Museum of Appalachia?
Mr. Irwin: Well, I guess, like anything else, there’s several things that I could mention, but first of all, I was always interested in the older people of the community. My Grandfather Rice was a fascinating man. He was an adventurer and was a coal miner as a child, and went out west and dug for Jesse James’ gold and was in the Oklahoma land opening, and fought down when Teddy Roosevelt was in Puerto Rico and Spanish American War, and stayed with the family of the Dalton Boys, the sister of the Dalton Boys and her husband, and came back and built a big house over in Knox County and stayed there for sixty years and farmed, but I learned, you know, I was interested to start with. I mean, I was always interested, same way with everything. So he knew and had a great respect and appreciation for his ancestors, as did some of my other people. So I had no idea of going into this. Somehow, I wanted to go into the diplomatic thing, and that’s why I got a Master’s degree in International Law and was going to Georgetown and so forth, but thought I’d teach a year before I did, and then I ended up staying with it. I went to an auction one day; it was the old Miller place down below the dam, and the Millers had been among the very first settlers here. I was Superintendent of the Schools at the time. And we worked five-and-a-half days; worked till noontime on Saturday, and I had a meeting every night, practically, sometimes three weeks without a single night home. But Saturday afternoon, I went up there and they had all these treasures from pioneer, frontier times laid out, you know, and people were buying the old wagon seat that the first Millers used when they came here, and I heard someone say they were gonna make a coffee table out of it, you know, put legs on it and all. Someone was buying the old – they had an old grist mill, and they were getting these measuring, wooden measuring handmade barrels, and they were going to shellac them and shine them up. And then I remember one thing in particular was a little handmade half-bushel measure that they started to sell, and someone said just in passing, one of the neighbors said, “They fished that out of the river during the Barn Creek Flood.” Well, I had always heard of this great devastating flood on a creek called Barren, B-A-R-R-E-N, I guess, but everybody called it ‘Barn Creek.’ And the river, the creek swept down through the hollows and drowned hundreds of horses and cattle and mules and twenty-one people were drowned in that little area, and many of them, dozens of them sat on top of their houses, or in trees during the night. But it was real sort of sad to me to say, well here’s something that connects the people with that flood. Here’s something that washed away and fifty miles downstream, somebody got it out and used it for, you know, fifty years or a hundred years. So I bought that and a few other things, and then they had the ox yoke. So that was sort of one of the things that I remember as being one of the first times that I began to think I’d want to save some of these things. My grandparents had given me a few things, and my Grandfather Rice gave me some old tools that could no longer be used, made by his great-grandfather, the man that built the old mill. And he said, “You and your brother,” – my brother David – said, “You might want to start a little museum someday.” Well, I didn’t even know what the word ‘museum’ meant at the time, you know. But those are the kind of things that, I guess, inspired me at the start.
Mrs. Zucker: Your museum is so unique, I think, not just because of the artifacts it contains, not just because of the important buildings and the construction and the layout, but the signage is particularly unique, the signage on all of your artifacts, which I always have a feeling is written by you. Is mostly written by you?
Mr. Irwin: All of it. It’s one thing – I’ve often said that if you take an object and you separate it from its history, then to a very great extent, you know, you’ve destroyed the item. So I have – now, when I get items, I never put them away until I put them in my office, which is piled to the ceiling, but I always write the history of it, who I got it from, who made it, who mended it and who kept it. I got something I was looking at last night that belonged to an old fellow by the name of Walter Lowe and I had – it was just an old handmade rake – but I pointed out that he lived in Smoky Junction and that he and about twelve other children were born in a little log cabin which Howard Baker – I suggested to him that he get it, and so he called me yesterday and said he’s interested in getting it – but Walter Lowe was a great hero in World War II. As a matter of fact, people referred to him as the Sergeant York of World War II, got more medals than anybody in the whole war, so they say. Well, that’s his little cabin up there, so this rake, to put it in the museum doesn’t mean much, but when you say that it belonged to Walter Lowe and how he walked twenty miles to join the Army, and, you know, all this kind of thing, then all of a sudden you look at it in a little different light. There’s so many of these things that I have and so many that I don’t have up, but that’s – I do get more comments on that than almost anything else, because it does make it a little more personal and meaningful, I guess.
Mrs. Zucker: Well, it’s inspired me at some point in my life to get trifocals, so I can read the signage, you know, and it works for me. How successful are you? I mean, how successful is the museum? Tell us a little bit about what its successes are.
Mr. Irwin: You can answer that two ways. I can tell you on the negative side that I’ve got tens of thousands of items stored up that I want to get out, and just what I think are classic, a lot of things of different sorts, and I’m doing the good and the bad. I bought an estate out down here near Louden one day – and still got that piled up – and one of the things that was in that was two old KKK Clans – whatever you call them – uniform?
Mrs. Zucker: Costumes?
Mr. Irwin: Robes. And so it was interesting to me because this is one of the more affluent families in the region, and they were doctors and married into the governor’s family and so forth, but when they came home from the funeral of one of their patriots one day, the KKK had invited – had cooked lots for them and all this kind of thing. So it’s dangerous to display something like that, but at the same time, if you don’t, then it’s a matter of censoring, you know, that kind of thing. You don’t just put out the best thing. So there’s so many of those things from a non-successful standpoint, when I walk around, anywhere I walk around, to any of the buildings, all I see are things that need to be done. Right now, and on the success side, you know, gosh, I would never have dreamed that all these things could have happened. For example, as we speak, I think, there’s a film company in Tokyo that’s showing a film on the museum. Same thing in Europe. All of you here, most all of you – maybe you not, Joan Ellen – can remember a lady by the name of Loretta Young. Remember her?
Mrs. Zucker: Had a big hat and came through the door. I can even remember the theme song.
Mr. Irwin: What was it?
Mrs. Zucker: [hums a tune] But anyway.
Mr. Irwin: You want to take over the show? Is that what you’re trying to do?
Mrs. Zucker: [slaps the table] Why not? I couldn’t do it.
Mr. Irwin: At any rate, what does she have to do with the success? As we are sitting here this afternoon, they’re coming back, Loretta Young’s son and his wife are filming the putting together of an old log house up in Virginia. So this is going to be shown on the history channel, and, you know, for the whole nation. And so we’ve been fortunate to have so many things like that. And the guy that’s going to be doing the narration, is it Smith? Harry, Howard Smith?
Mrs. Zucker: K, Howard K. Smith.
Mr. Irwin: Howard K. Smith. He’s going to be doing the narration, and will be up there for two or three weeks. Well, then last night we played for a good sized group of educators from all over the South. Last week we played, my band and I, for the National Convention of Smith & Wesson Collectors. Almost every day there’s an article that’s coming out in the Atlanta Constitution that – one of the largest papers in the country – with a lot of pictures and so forth about the museum. The Chattanooga Times has done one in a few days, and almost every day, some small magazine, like, I got the AAA, I’m getting it late, and they had a picture. Did you see that picture in there of Howard Baker shooting the anvil that we’ll be shooting? So from a success standpoint, but the thing about it that most museums that I’m familiar with would have a staff at least from ten to fifty times what we’ve got, and they would have a budget, the same thing. So I’m still raising potatoes and onions and eating them and working fifteen, eighteen hours a day and trying to keep the thing going. In the wintertime, though, you know, we lose about a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars every single day, and then you get so despondent because you think you’re never going to – then when summer comes, with the groups and all, you begin to sort of break even. I’m in the process, since you bring these personal things up, and have been for several years, to put the museum, and I’ve gotta do it quickly, not that I’m expecting to leave here, into a trust that will be there for henceforth and evermore. My daughter totally agrees with this, of giving it, in effect, giving it away, and we only have the one child now. We’ve lost one in a car wreck as you may know not long ago. But she’s in favor of this, and so it’s a most difficult thing. These things that I have walked miles to get and cherished so much, and they were mine and I’ve loved them and displayed them, then all of a sudden, they’re not going to belong to you anymore, you know. And it’s a really traumatic thing, even though I’ll have control, maybe, of the board, until we get to, you know how boards go, sometimes they can last a long time. So that’s what I’m trying to do, and there’s sort of tens of thousands of people whose lives are sort of presented there who otherwise would be totally forgotten. Just amazing at the fascinating people who are almost unknown in their respective regions, you know.
Mrs. Zucker: Now, at the beginning of this session, I preempted your talk that you were going to give, and I want to ask you if I have asked you enough questions that might have been answered by your talk, or whether you have some things that you really wished to say that I didn’t give you a chance to.
Mr. Irwin: Well, I’d like to go through my notes, and it’ll take about, I’d say, two or two-and-a-half hours.
[laughter]
Mrs. Zucker: Okay, how about fifteen minutes?
Mr. Irwin: No, I think you’ve done a good job asking the questions, and they may have some questions out here.
Mrs. Zucker: I have one more question to ask you and then, if we can manage it physically, we’ll give a try at asking John Rice some questions. Does your life surprise you?
Mr. Irwin: Yeah, I never had any, you know, any idea of being able to meet so many interesting people and great people and getting the recognition that we’ve got, hopefully, for the people. No, to give you an example, I remember when a congressman came to the area and I thought I knew somebody that knew the congressman personally, and I felt, you know, it was beyond any dream I had to ever know a congressman, or even a member of the state legislature. And one of the greatest thrills that I ever had was in Knoxville, when I rode up in one of the old hotels there with Archie Campbell, and that was the greatest thrill of my life. I don’t know whether you know who Archie Campbell was, a great entertainer, and later became one of my close and dear friends. But now, you know, they honored Howard Baker here a while back at Congress, and they had the meeting in the old Senate building. They had that meeting there for him and him only, and all of the senators gathered, and he was good enough to invite me and spent time talking to Ted Kennedy, for example, and to Monahan, and to Strom Thurmond and to all of those, Senator Byrd, he’s one of my favorites, old time fiddler from West Virginia. And just by the museum, people who come by there, well, of course, Alex Haley came by there for one afternoon and stayed for ten years, literally.
Mrs. Zucker: I’m sorry we don’t have time to talk about that chapter.
Mr. Irwin: Well, it’s a fascinating thing, and he did stay there and lived in there, had a little room in the back of our house, and it was so popular, but he never really knew how popular. But many of the great people whom I’ve known were not recognized. Alex Stewart, and I wrote the book about him, and I get more accolades, so many people have told me over and over again that that one book was a better contribution to mankind than the whole museum put together, and I get love letters about it almost daily, not because I wrote it, but because he, a so-called uneducated person was one of the best educated people that I’ve known. I asked him once if his granddaddy had much education. He said, “Yeah, he had a right good education, but he never went to school any,” and he was exactly right. You could ask any question and it would come out as if it was written by a poet and had been polished, you know. He said, for example, he said – I was asking him about the poverty conditions – he said, “A heap of people don’t know what hard times is, and a good neighbor is worth more than money.” I mean, he would roll those out, one after another.
Mrs. Zucker: Thank you so much.
Mr. Irwin: Well, it’s been a – either they’ve been real courteous and affable and receptive, or they’ve all been asleep, [laughter] because they just sit there.
Mrs. Zucker: I’ve looked around; they’re all wide awake.
Mr. Irwin: No, they are. I know that.
Mrs. Zucker: We have a few minutes left. Charlie, would you like to ask your question? Get up and yell, because –
Charlie: I thought you’d never get to this.
Mrs. Zucker: Get to your question? [laughs] Sorry about that.
Charlie: I wanted to ask Mr. Irwin if he had anything he could tell us about the legend of John Hendrix, and did John Hendrix really live and go out in the woods here for forty days and forty nights and predict Oak Ridge was coming, and why didn’t the county organize against it.
[laughter]
Mrs. Zucker: I have a feeling this microphone is not on. You might just check it. [to Mr. Irwin] Did you hear that? [to the audience] Did everybody hear that?
Mr. Irwin: Yeah, I must say that I never heard of John Hendrix while I was living here, and that I’m sure that there’s been a lot said about him and a lot written about him. I’ve got every article, I think, that’s ever been written about him. I knew his daughter, and I knew his granddaughter, rather, and I knew his son. I don’t want to be irreverent or anything, but his son was sort of, as preachers’ children are wont to be sometimes, a notorious rambler and so forth and was considered to be sort of the – I don’t want to put it too harshly, but he was always in trouble and hanging up around the beer joint and so forth, and he later was killed in a shootout, which didn’t surprise anyone, but as far as John was concerned, I can’t tell you any more than what’s been written about him that he supposedly did all these things.
Mrs. Zucker: Another question, if you can speak loudly, or, well, I just called on June Adamson over here I think.
[inaudible audience member speaks]
Mrs. Zucker: Did everybody hear that? June asked what the development of the word ‘Appalachia’ is and where it came from.
Mr. Irwin: Well June is a scholar and a writer and she knows as much about these things as I do, but that’s been kicked around for a long time. Everybody asks, you know, what the derivation is, and I guess the usual answer is that it’s an Indian name. But that’s pretty obvious that it is an Indian name.
[inaudible audience member speaks]
Mr. Irwin: Beg your pardon?
[inaudible audience member speaks]
Mr. Irwin: Well, okay. There was a tribe of Indians down, of all places, in northern Florida, in that area, and it was a tribe. They were called – I don’t remember how you spell it, but it was a derivation, I mean it was similar to Appalachia, Appalachi or something of this sort, and that group of Indians would forage in various areas and so forth, and ostensibly, they finally came up as far as northern Georgia, in what is part of Appalachia. They would come up there occasionally and people started referring to it, and I guess the other Indians as “That’s the Appalachia region down there,” meaning after that tribe of Indians down in Florida. Now the fellow that dug that up is named Davis, and he wrote a book about the development of the Appalachian region, and it’s the most documented book I’ve ever seen in my life. There’s a hundred, literally one hundred pages of bibliography, and ninety-five percent of people who write about any area, and so forth, just write about things they’ve heard or read, you know, without any basis at all, just totally worthless.
Audience member: Where can we get that book?
Mr. Irwin: Well, I just happen to have them for sale at the Museum of Appalachia.
[laughter]
Mr. Irwin: Why do you think I’m plugging it so much? He will be there, this guy will, at the homecoming, along with the other authors, and I’m just – I gave a copy of it to Lamar Alexander. I said, “You’ll like this book.” And he called me back and he said he’d read it through in, you know, a short period of time and thought it was one of the best too. So, he’s the one, I have to give this guy credit for that.
[inaudible audience member speaks]
Mr. Irwin: Well, you know, when the federal government set up the Appalachian Regional Commission, and people always ask me how to pronounce it. I have no idea, Appa-latch-ia, Appa-lay-chia or whatever. I’ve always called it Appa-latch-ia. When they set that up, they marked off parts, all or parts of thirteen states, including a little bit of the northeast part of Mississippi, around Booneville and in that section. I think maybe the reason there’s no mountains down there, it’s near the Natches Trail, maybe the reason they did that is that to get the Mississippi delegation to vote for it or something, you know, but you always have this problem when you talk about Appalachia. Do you talk about downtown Knoxville, Asheville, North Carolina?
[inaudible audience member speaks]
Mr. Irwin: Well, you said that I’m a musician. The committee’s still out discussing that question. But, no, it’s interesting you mentioned that, because I just finished a three hundred page book. A lot of these articles in the paper about it, in the Oak Ridger, ‘Irwin Book Reflects Tennessee Heritage.’ There’s a brand new book just out called A People and Their Music: The Story behind the Story of Country Music. And to me it’s a fascinating kind of thing, because all those great celebrities like Earl Scrubbs and Roy Acuff and Grandpa Jones and all the rest of them, they had national, international influence, Bill Monroe, everyone started out without any encouragement, you know, nobody encouraged them. Didn’t even have their own instruments, and they had to sneak to get somebody’s instrument to play, their daddy’s instrument or something. But it was unbelievably important in this area, because some of those songs would be inspiring, and how can you have this kind of a drudgery life, how can you work in the coal mines twelve hours a day, six days a week in a coal mine that’s that high, eighteen inches high, some of them are twelve inches high, and still, you know, have your wits about you? But the music did as much as anything else, and it would inspire. It would bring tears to people’s eyes. And as my daddy used to say, it would make the hair on the back of your neck stand up even.
Mrs. Zucker: That’s a good question. I’m glad you asked that, ’cause it was one of mine I never got to ask.
[inaudible audience member speaks]
Mr. Irwin: Yeah, I brought a lot of the brochures, but I left them in the car.
[laughter]
Mrs. Zucker: But there is an anvil shoot.
Mr. Irwin: Oh, the Fourth of July, we’re having, in addition to the anvil shoot, which by the way is being covered nationwide this year, we have a lot of other musicians up there and sheep herding and rail splitting and crosscuts. It’s sort of like – spinning wheel, cooking – it’s sort of like the [Tennessee] Homecoming used to be a miniature Homecoming, so it’s on the regular price, no extra charge, free parking, smile at the door.
Mrs. Zucker: I want to thank you so much.
Mr. Irwin: Well, I want to thank you, Sue and you and all of the folks for coming out on this beautiful summer day; it is now, summer, after the last few days.
[applause]